


Foxfire's Light

by SofiaBane



Series: Eight Days a Week: Interstices and One-Shots [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: And if that means letting their daughters paint his nails by god he's gonna do it, Because he will give Harry the world, Established Relationship, Family, Gen, Harry Potter Next Generation, Harry Potter is a Good Parent, If you're only here for Harrymort they get a parallel plot alongside Ivy's, It is going to cause Problems, Kid Fic, Magical Theory, Minister for Magic Voldemort, Politics, Squibs, Voldemort is also a good parent, plenty of Death Eaters' children in the cast
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-07
Updated: 2019-08-14
Packaged: 2020-04-12 00:41:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 49,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19121062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SofiaBane/pseuds/SofiaBane
Summary: Livia Felicitas Gaunt-Potter: heir of Slytherin, youngest of the five daughters of Voldemort and Harry Potter, secret squib. But she’s determined to get through Hogwarts, magic or no. Maybe Ivy can’t be a witch, but she can be amagician.This is a standalone fic set in the Cicatrization universe; see the notes within.





	1. Pre-Hogwarts

Ivy is five when she understands that she’s different.

She’s too young to say how, exactly. But she’s got four older sisters and two fathers and three best friends, and there’s some sense even then that she doesn’t fit into the world in the way they do.

She’s six when she understands this feeling is magic. All the flourishes that her parents do to make the world work, those aren’t normal. Or are they, if everyone she knows can do them?

Ivy has never made anything explode by accident. She’s never made a glass crack or a plate of carrots vanish or even the paint on her walls change color. And she doesn’t know this, because her parents will never discuss such things in her presence, but they’re beginning to be impatient. All four of their older daughters had done some sort of magic by age three or four – which, fine, is precocious, but they just exist in a deeply magical household.

Ivy is seven when she picks up on these expectations of her fathers. So she’s seven and a half when she decides she needs to fake her magic.

There’s a hairline crack in a ceramic bowl in the dining room, from a time that her sister Cori had thrown a dog toy badly. But nobody’s noticed it, yet. So Ivy takes it in two hands, snaps it neatly at the break, and then balances the bowl back together. She adds some fruit on top to hide the damage. And when the seven of them are eating dinner that night – well, Ivy waits for an argument to break out, because Aura is eleven and has just started Hogwarts, and Q and Phaedra are almost sixteen and exasperated to have her there, even though they’re in different houses and different years and different classes, so Ivy doesn’t understand what’s so annoying about that. Anyway, everyone is home for Christmas holidays, and Harry is trying to make every minute together perfect. But when Aura shouts, “You’re not even that good at Quidditch!” at Q, Ivy takes advantage of the chaos to deftly tug the tablerunner beneath the broken bowl.

It falls into two pieces, apples rolling across the table. And Ivy knows how all her sisters have reacted to their own accidental magic before – “Sorry, sorry,” she’s saying, thinking of how panicked Cori had been when she’d last vanished all the windows on one side of the house last year. “I didn’t mean to.”

“Ivy, hon, Aura didn’t mean to shout – “ Harry’s gathering the bowl and apples together, casting a neat _reparo_. “Hey,” he says, reaching over to tug a lock of her hair. “Magic, huh? We’re proud of you.”

And she knows she only got away with it because it’s what they’d wanted to see. That’s all.

She’d had a training wand since she was four, and there’s books and shows to teach beginner’s magic. But there’s just – nothing. The way people talk about magic as a living force bears no resemblance to the dead stick she holds in her hand. The only magic she _has_ got is Parseltongue – and thank Merlin, as the entire family speaks it – but that’s it. After so many nights sitting up past bedtime, trying to cast lumos into the dark – at some point she knows it’s better to give up.

So she’ll continue to fake it. Magic is the entire world around her. It’s her birthright, Hogwarts is _her_ castle as an heir to Slytherin, and she needs to go as all her sisters have gone. She just needs to belong.

 

It gets easier the year after that. She’s got a phone, and she’ll look up videos of magic tricks – which is a funny way of saying it, but they mean Quotidian magic tricks, tricks done without any magic at all. She practices her sleight of hand, palming coins and scarves to conjure later. It’s all what people expect to see.

And she knows she can study other types of magic just fine. She looks at Q and Phaedra’s and Aura’s textbooks before they go off to school that summer: there’s no casting in Herbology, or Astronomy, or History. She could take Care of Magical Creatures like both twins, or Arithmancy like Phaedra. Even Quotidian Studies, which Voldemort has said has become a magitech class.

Actually, she’ll probably need to figure out how to get a working mobile within Hogwarts anyway. It’s been useful.

She’s not sure about Divination (though Harry’s said he faked his way through that class through OWLs. It just seems rather bleak). Or Potions, which has no spellcasting that she can find, but it doesn’t seem like a practice accessible to non-wixes. Curious, she goes to Voldemort one evening and asks if she can brew a potion by herself. Voldemort doesn’t treat them like children nearly so often as Harry does, which can have its drawbacks but for now is useful. “Yes,” he says, turning his office chair to summon a beginner’s potions book from the shelf. “What do you want to make?”

“Lemme see.” She sits across the desk (Harry abhors this, he says it looks more like a business meeting than a family, but Ivy likes leaning over the desk with Voldemort across from her), flipping through the book. Ideally something useful, another sleight of hand. _Invisibility potion, for objects_ reads one heading. “This one.”

Voldemort lets her into the potions lab and sets out the necessary ingredients. “The glossary,” he says, folding a page down, for when she needs to look up the definitions of _diced_ and _powdered_ and _anticlockwise_. “Don’t disrupt the fireproofing spells beneath the cauldron.” And he leaves her to it.

She works carefully, her heart in her mouth as she examines the cauldron after each step, watching for it to curdle or boil over or whatever a potion brewed by a squib should do.

But a couple hours later, she’s got a cauldron full of shimmering lavender potion – darker and a bit runnier than the textbook says it should be, but when she dips the end of a quill into the cooled solution, it camouflages itself against the dark stone of the cauldron immediately. Something in Ivy’s chest loosens, and she goes to present the half-quill to Voldemort.

That night, she takes out a scroll:

 **_DADA X, Charms X, Transfiguration X (but theory & history _ ** **_✓)_ **

**_Herbology_ ** **_✓, Astronomy_ ** **_✓, History_ ** **_✓, Potions_ ** **_✓_ **

**_Arithmancy_ ** **_✓, Quotidian Studies_ ** **_✓, Runes X, Care of Magical Creatures_ ** **_✓, Divination ?_ **

It’s quite a heartening list, looking at it. She digs out a chest she’d received for her last birthday, one opened by Parseltongue, and puts the scroll inside. It will be the first of many items she’ll collect in this chest, a sort of lifeline.

She puts the invisibility potion in that chest, and some potions that create smoke and distraction. She’s got magnets, mirrors, double-sided tape, enchanted ink. Maybe she can’t be a witch, but she can be a _magician_.

The other reason that her – task gets easier at age eight, is Teddy, who brings her to the whole Weasley family.

Teddy Black has no parents, but he lives with Ginny and Tonks, and the entire Weasley and Weasley-adjacent clan has taken him in. He’s Ivy’s best friend. “I wish I could do that,” she says wistfully when he’s changing his hair, dark brown to blond, as absently as other people tap their foot.

Teddy stops, immediately self-conscious. “It’s not that great. Tonks can give herself wings, but she says it’ll probably stunt my growth to try things like that yet.”

“Boring,” Ivy laments. But really, some days she is jealous of how effortlessly magic comes to everyone around her. They would be lost without it, yet they take it for granted in a hundred small ways every day.

And on this day, Ivy and Teddy have taken a portkey after school, one given to Teddy by George to deliver him straight to the backroom of Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes. “Best to keep your kind off the street,” George had said to them, grinning. So now Teddy and Ivy are Fred and George’s most frequent testers for new products.

It is a treasure trove of magic tricks. Ivy brings home trick wands, wondering if she could smuggle them into Transfiguration. There’s smoke bombs and potions that could approximate some charms. Ivy smuggles _The Standard Book of Spells, Volume 1_ off Phaedra’s shelf and begins marking off charms she can fake: levitation no (or not yet, anyway), cheering charm yes. Severing charm yes, with a trick blade; Aguamenti yes with some sort of concealed water bottle. Orchideous yes, if she can disassemble Fred and George’s Insta-Bloom Boutonniere into something that can be palmed into a flowerpot. Sometimes she buys things; more often Fred and George just give her products, as they call Harry their patron for reasons Ivy had never investigated. The merchandise and the spell book (all marked up in her own code, by now) both go into her chest.

She doesn’t tell Teddy why she suggests going to WWW after school so often. “I think you’ve got a crush,” Teddy says one day as he digs the portkey out of his schoolbag.

“Ew, gross,” she protests. “They’re so old.”

“Uh-huh,” Teddy says, unconvinced, as he offers her the portkey.

At least portkeys work for her, and side-along apparition, and the floo. And broomsticks, which is a relief since she’d had visions of the magnetism and anti-slip spells not taking for a squib. Flying feels like the nearest thing to magic, she decides.

Her parents’ library has nothing on squibs. (What a stupid word. She knows that in the Unification _Muggle_ had become _Quotidian_ , a bit more dignified, but nobody had been advocating to give squibs a less stupid name.) But the school library does, albeit only a few passages in an encyclopedia of magical health. _A squib is a non-magical or magically deficient person born into a magic-majority family_ and so on. It says that a gradation of magical ability may be observed, from the ability to cast simple spells to an inability to even see magical creatures or portals like Diagon Alley. _Due to the rarity of squibs, a comprehensive study on the causes of squibdom_ (god, what an awful word) _has never been undertaken._

She can’t question why she hasn’t got magic. Harry and Voldemort have explained her birth to her from early on: that her birth mother died, and it wasn’t her fault, and she was saved with blood magic. She knows only a tiny bit about her birth mother, that she was a Parselmouth who’d sought out the same Jordanian camp of Parselmouths where Voldemort had lived before. She knows she was young and physically fragile. _She_ had had magic – Voldemort had given her blood to healers to test for any latent health problems – but it was impossible to say how much she had or how well she used it. Ivy knows nothing of her birth father at all. So maybe it’s their fault; maybe it’s a side effect of a difficult birth; maybe it’s something else, or nothing at all really. She doesn’t like to dwell on these questions, because they can’t _change_ anything.

But sometimes, she allows herself to think about how unfair it all is. She hasn’t done anything to deserve such a harder life than her sisters had.

But then that thought makes her feel empty inside, and she shoves it away.

 

She practices levitation with invisible twine, but the feather she’s using keeps slipping out of its knot. The tape sticks up quite visibly, so she’ll need glue or rubber cement, but it’s got to be something she can apply in class. So she spends more time in their potions lab, and after a half dozen potions or so, Voldemort finally just leaves it unlocked, and says to bring him whatever she brews. “Glue?” he says doubtfully, when she’s setting a potions text into its holder on this particular evening. “There are a dozen sticking spells you could use….”

She’s already worked out her alibi. “I haven’t tried a potion with a resting period before. Is there room in the fridge for it?”

“Yes.” And he leaves her to it. She pours mineral water in the cauldron to begin.

The next day, she’s got a gummy-soft glue, that she can hold in a ball and roll over whatever needs to stick. Her “levitation” wouldn’t pass the scrutiny of exams, so perhaps she couldn’t look too adept at a spell in class only to be unable to recreate it at exam time, but – well, she’ll think of something.

Transfiguration is easy for small objects – she’d learned to palm a needle for a matchstick when she was seven – and impossible for large ones. Uncle Ron still talked about his teapot-turtle that still whistled and steamed; how on _earth_ was she going to switch in a turtle in class? (And then return it to its home when she was done, obviously, she wasn’t a monster.)

So she returns to Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes, examining all the transfiguration-sort items they’ve got for sale. Teddy wanders the aisle behind her, looking at the Monster Kaleidoscope and not particularly taking note of what she’s doing. Looking at the trick wands – she’ll have to snap one open and see what makes it work. She brings three up to the register, and Fred gives her a curious look before throwing a Moulting Teapot into her bag as well.

Charms, transfiguration. Defense. She knows from Harry that a lot of DADA is theoretical, so that’s fine. But the other parts – the self-defense and dueling parts – well, she’s sure there’s potions ingredients she can grind together to throw sparks at someone. It won’t actually keep her safe, but it’s enough to distract them for a bit. She finds a flower that spits flames when it’s squeezed right, that looks just like Confringo from a distance. A pocketful of marbles is the same as the marble jinx. She begins to look for products that can throw up a shield like Protego.

Her chest of props and notes and potions grows fuller. She gets a reputation at school and from her family of being a bookworm, hungry for knowledge indiscriminately. All her sisters had subjects they favored, but none of them brewed potions or spliced plants for fun. Ivy does it because she has to be that much better. And sometimes it’s satisfying and sometimes it’s exhausting. But she needs to go to Hogwarts.

 

It’s the summer of her ninth birthday, when a group of her friends has gone to Diagon Alley together: Q and Phaedra had split off early with their own friends, but Aura and Cori had stuck with her, and they’ve got Teddy and Ruby Parkinson and Finn and Grainne Lovegood with them. They’re still sucking on buzzberry lollies from the sweets shop as they wander into WWW. “All my favorite people, traveling in a pack now!” Fred jumps over the counter to meet them. “Save me one?”

“Yeah, here.” Aura takes a lolly from her bag.

“Cheers. What sort of mischief, mayhem, tomfoolery, or japes do you need today?”

They scatter – the twins have installed a vibrant orange fountain in a corner that gives off great diaphanous bubbles showing watchers’ daydreams (“all family-friendly,” George had assured Harry and Voldemort when they’d last come in), so there’s a crowd gathered around it now, whispering and giggling. Ivy watches, then goes to the most useful aisle to her, the one with charms and enchantments.

And so she jumps a bit when Fred sidles up beside her, as she’s reading the back of a petrification mist bottle. “Got any ideas for what we should make next?”

“Ah.” She’s really still the most stuck on transfiguration. “Maybe a trick wand that could be… loaded? With whatever we want?”

“Huh,” he says thoughtfully. “Come to the backroom, we’ll ask George about it. Conjuration is more his thing than mine.”

Suddenly the attention is making her nervous. Setting the misting bottle back on its shelf, she asks, “Haven’t you got to look after the till?”

“Nah, Emeril’s on it now. Come on.”

George is in the backroom, blue-tinted glasses covering most of his face as he tinkers with strands of hiar – not unicorn, maybe troll or centaur? – tucked inside a purple box. “Hi, Ivy. Just keep three feet away, that’s as big as any potential explosions will be.”

Ivy takes a seat at the stool across from him; Fred shuts the door and drops a silencing spell before it. “So,” he says, warm and clever as he always is. “You’re a squib. Or else you’ve got some _deep_ aversion to magic that you should talk to a mind healer about.”

“I – “ She’d done it right, she’d done it all right, and she had so seldom considered that she could get caught that she didn’t really have a cover story for it.

The panic must be clear on her face, because Fred crosses the room, sits on the stool beside her, slouching a bit as though he can make himself smaller and less threatening. “No, we think it’s great. Brilliant. Want to hear all about it. We’re not going to tell your parents,” he adds, because she’s still clearly anxious, “though you probably should. Voldemort would raise hell if any kid of his weren’t admitted to Hogwarts, magic or no.”

“Not yet,” Ivy says. “I’ll tell them later.” She hasn’t figured out when. After graduation perhaps, or at least after OWLs when she can just take upper level courses of all the subjects that don’t require magic.

“Yeah, sure. I think they’d be helpful, though.”

“… Probably, yeah.” Still the idea of telling her parents yet makes her throat swell closed. She can’t even _imagine_ …. Their house is so deeply magical, and she just doesn’t fit into it. They will be so disappointed in her.

She always underestimates how emotionally astute the twins are beneath their guise of chaos, because George is pulling off his goggles and Fred is handing her a pouch. “Trick pocket,” he says, as though to calm this storm clearly building inside her. “Hide anything up to thirty pounds. We can’t put separate pockets in it yet though, you’ll need to take two….”

“And you really need a Quotie chemistry book. Here.” George thumps a very heavy textbook before her. “Really no point in magic when you’ve got chemistry.”

“Well,” Fred grimaces.

“ _Almost_ no point in magic. You’ve seen a lot of the components we use – I assume you broke open those trick wands and illusory wristwatches?” Ivy nods. “Good girl. And you’ve got potions, of course. And maybe runes? Neither of us took ancient runes in school; really, that’s another one your dads would know more about than we ever would….”

Runes. She hadn’t even considered their potential. She dabs her nose discreetly; when Fred conjures her a handkerchief, it makes her want to cry harder. “But… you don’t need to do this. You could get in trouble.”

“We’ve spent our entire lives in trouble,” George says fondly. “It’s fine, really.”

They haven’t got a _lot_ of time – her friends will start to miss her in a bit – but they’ve got enough. There are rings that hold potions ingredients, flash paper, prosthetic fingertips…. “You’ve got to tell Minerva after graduation,” George says. “Imagine her face.”

“… Yeah, maybe,” Ivy hedges.

“Okay, she may not find it funny, but Flitwick definitely would.”

She goes home with a satchel of goods. She needs to practice.

\---

It happens when Ivy is ten. It’s just the three of them at home now: Q and Phaedra are at their first year of university in Cardiff, and Aura’s in Prague for her fourth year exchange, and Cori is in her first year of Hogwarts, and Ivy is alone. It has mostly been good. Tonight it’s not.

Harry works irregular hours, but it’s more nights than not, so he’s just fallen into bed when he hears a sound from deeper in the house. It takes a moment for him to place – their girls had learned early on to put up silencing charms when they just wanted to cry because childhood is hard – so it’s actually rather unusual to hear any of their daughters crying. “Ivy,” he murmurs, lifting his wand to light the lanterns again.

Voldemort runs a hand over his face. “She seemed fine when she arrived home.”

“Yeah, well.” He’s summoning both of their dressing gowns. Voldemort follows him down the corridor.

Knock. “Ivy?”

Through the door they can hear her attempt to swallow her sobs. “Sorry.”

“No – can we come in?”

She doesn’t say yes but she doesn’t say no either. The door is locked manually; Harry charms it open.

Ivy is a mess, sitting in the middle of her bed with _Hogwarts, A History_ in her lap. Absent context, it would be funny, as Harry thinks not even Hermione has ever cried over that book. But she’s clearly devastated, and so Harry grabs Voldemort’s hand to pull him across the room, both of them settling onto the comforter beside her. “Ivy. Baby. What’s wrong?”

She says it through tears: “I can’t go to Hogwarts.”

They exchange concerned looks over her head. “But you like Hogwarts,” Harry says. “I thought you were looking forward to it. Your letter is coming this month and I know it will be a big change – “

“I’m not getting a letter,” she says, her hand clenching over the page she’s got open. “Because I’m a squib.” And then she bursts into tears again.

Their magic coils, burns. Even just the word spoken aloud feels like a curse. So when Ivy is crying too hard to discuss this, Harry pulls her against his chest as Voldemort lifts the book out of her lap. “You are not a squib,” Voldemort says, in a break from her crying.

She wipes her face. “Yes, I am.”

“You have Parseltongue.”

“Yeah, and that’s it. Every other time – everything you thought I could do – “ And instead of explaining herself, she slips off the bed, approaching her wardrobe. She pulls out a box, dumping it all onto the carpet. With a callous sort of efficiency, she begins sorting it. “Trick wands, mirror boxes, double-sided tape. Potions.” She sets a half-dozen jars to one side.

“You wouldn’t be able to brew potions without magic, either.”

“I haven’t got magic,” Ivy tells Voldemort firmly. And somehow it seems to help, her sorting through her… props. “The first thing I ever did? That bowl had already broken, you just didn’t know. And that candle….” She’s opening a few small jars of ingredients, putting a tea candle before her. She dips one finger into one jar, another in a second, and rubs them both on the wick. A tiny flame bursts between her fingers.

By now Harry and Voldemort have slipped from the bed to the carpet to examine the stash. “It’s not magic at all,” Ivy says, wiping off her fingers as the candle burns before her. “This is glycerin, and this is manganese. They’re Quotidian. That’s all.”

Voldemort unconsciously puts a hand to his forehead as he studies the items before them. When Ivy gives him a wary look, he shakes his head. “This is… impressive.”

“I did it right. I did everything right. Look.” She takes up a matchstick; palming it, she drops a needle to the carpet in its place. Even knowing it’s a Quotie sleight of hand, Harry can’t see how she does it. It’s clear she’s practiced… a lot. Alone. “And I could do half of the Transfiguration text, and a lot in Charms, and a lot of DADA. But – “ her breath is shaky; she might begin crying again. “I didn’t know about the letters. That it’s all written down in a book. I thought, since you were both magic, they would just assume…. But now none of this matters, because I can’t go to Hogwarts anyway.” And then she is crying again, slumping against Voldemort’s robes as he’s nearer to her. And he wraps an arm around her narrow shoulders carefully, but he looks to Harry, because they are both at such a loss.

Harry is sorting through the jars and notes and props. A good portion of it is WWW merchandise, which is… brilliant. But before he can say anything, Voldemort offers calmly, “Do you _want_ to go to Hogwarts?”

“Yeah,” she says into his dressing robe.

“And you expected to deceive an entire school for seven years?”

“Five,” she corrects, sitting up. “It’s just three classes. I’ve only got to get through OWLs and then I can study everything else.”

It’s a very pragmatic response. Voldemort might be suppressing a smile, while Harry reflects that she’s only ten, she shouldn’t have to be thinking of these things. “Five years,” Voldemort agrees. “But before you make that decision – you have other options.” He conjures a handkerchief for her; she takes it. “Hogwarts will provide for you in ways that other schools of magic will not.”

“And also we know all its tricks,” Harry says. “Which we hadn’t told the others before – because, well, they can get into enough trouble without it.” A near-smile from Ivy.

Voldemort continues: “We could bring private tutors here. They would be discreet. And however much magic you _do_ have,” he says as though he’s not entirely convinced, but who would choose to call themselves a squib if they weren’t? “they might develop it. Or you could go to a Quotidian school. There are prestigious ones – science and technology charter schools, if you’re interested in such things. Or you could take on an apprenticeship – not at eleven, but perhaps starting around fourteen.”

“I want to go to Hogwarts.”

“… Alright.”

“But I’ll need a letter. I could forge one – I think – but Cori hasn’t still got hers around – “

“You can forge things?” Harry interrupts, in skepticism and wonder.

A shrug. “I thought it would be useful?”

“You don’t need to forge anything,” Voldemort says. “Nor do we. The book containing all the names of magical children is kept in an isolated tower in Hogwarts. It has, purportedly, never been touched. However,” he says with near-hesitation, “Parseltongue will open any door in Hogwarts. I’ll visit soon, I have business there anyway.”

“Oh. Really?” Her eyes are bright.

It is the first of many – _tricks_ they would offer her. “Yes,” Voldemort says. “Don’t be reckless with it. You probably should have copies of the class syllabi,” he adds, looking over her notes. “Wait here.” He pushes himself off the floor.

And when it’s just the two of them, Harry takes a moment to sort through this pile again. “We’re really proud of you,” he says. “Not just, y’know, for this. But because you’ve become a really good person. But also… you shouldn’t have had to do this alone. It’s a lot to handle. I’m sorry, baby, we should’ve noticed.”

Ivy sort of laughs. “No, you shouldn’t.”

“Still.”

Voldemort returns, dropping a folder before her. “Syllabi are filed yearly with the Ministry. Bulstrode and Callahan might change their curriculum a bit between years, as they’re rather new, but I’m sure Filius has taught the same classes for the past fifty years.” He lowers himself to the carpet again. “You may need to tell someone else, who would help. Does Teddy know?” Ivy shakes her head. “Ruby? Cori?” More head shakes, and it makes Harry quite sad – Ivy and Cori are only a year and a half apart, and they shared a lot of their life. And Teddy and Ruby are her best friends. “Does anyone know?” Voldemort prompts her.

A moment of hesitation. “Fred and George.”

Harry laughs in surprise; they both startle. “Good,” he says. “I mean – good. I thought they just gave you stuff because they like you.”

She makes a face. “They _do_ like me,” he says. “But… yeah. They’d make things for me. Or show me how to make it myself. Like….” She pokes through her merchandise. “Levitation powder. It only works a few minutes at a time, and it’s got to be made at least a week before, but….” She takes a pinch, lifts a quill in her same hand, and lets go. “We just found that one last month. Fred and George needed to find someone who would sell us mooncalf tears first.” The quill floats gently above her hand, until she catches it again.

“Ivy.” Voldemort’s expression is… open, in ways Harry rarely saw. “That is just – exceptionally talented. Most wixes take magical theory for granted.”

“I know. But it’s interesting. And – I needed to.”

“It would be a waste if you didn’t get a proper magical education.”

“Uh-huh.”

“We will help in whatever way we’re able. Which is quite a lot.”

She sucks her lower lip into her mouth. “What if people find out?”

 _Then we Obliviate them_ , Harry wishes he could say, but they try not to threaten violence idly in this household. “Then they find out. And it would be fine. You will always – belong.” His voice sticks on that final word.

She looks between them. “No, what happens to _you_? If people know you had helped.”

It’s yet another thing a ten year old shouldn’t have to worry about. “Then I will go before the Wizengamot,” Voldemort answers calmly. “That is not your responsibility.”

“… Okay.” By now her feelings had burned themselves out, and they were all overdue for bed.

She scoops all of her materials back into her chest, until Harry pulls her close. “We are so, so proud of you,” he reiterates.

“I know.”

“Good.” He stretches out his back before getting up. “Time for bed now?”

“Uh-huh.” And she’s soft and sweet as he wraps her arms around Voldemort’s waist, leaning tight against his shoulder. He murmurs something in Parseltongue. Then, bedtime.

And as soon as Harry and Voldemort are alone in their bedroom, they drop a silencing charm at their door. “A squib,” Harry says, because it’s awkward to even hear aloud. “Our daughter is a squib.”

“Yes.”

“Is that… alright with you?”

Voldemort looks over his shoulder, from where he’s hanging his dressing robe. “I really don’t know what the alternative would be.”

“Me either.” He sinks onto the bed. “I’m just – sad for her. I wish we’d known earlier.”

Voldemort clicks his tongue. “You wish we’d _noticed_ earlier. And yes, I do too.”

“Yeah.” He pulls the blankets around them both. But somehow they stay up most of that night, planning what they’re able to.

 

As he said he would, Voldemort visits Hogwarts the following week. He’s got business with Minerva and the governors, he says, but he finds a moment to slip off alone. And Ivy is awaiting him anxiously when he returns. “Was my name in the book?”

“… It is now.”

“Oh.” She looks slightly crestfallen; Voldemort pauses before her.

“Do you have any magic like a Confundus charm? It’s what I used on the book,” he adds. “To confuse people, disorient them….”

“Don’t,” Harry objects. “That is… malicious.” He sees the value in it, should Ivy come close to being caught, but he can’t imagine his sweet youngest daughter along such things.

“Yeah,” she says. “But it’s a powder. It sticks to their clothes afterward, it’s not secret enough….”

So Voldemort gestures Ivy into their potions lab and, reluctantly, Harry follows.

 

Ivy’s eleventh birthday is in May, but all the late birthdays have their letters sent out by the end of March. The 31st of March is a Friday, and while it isn’t a _surprise_ when Ivy’s letter arrives while she’s at school, it’s nevertheless a relief. “Teddy got his this morning,” she says. “He showed me at lunch.”

“Want to ask him out to dinner to celebrate?” Harry offers.

“Yeah.” And then she’s got her phone out, because she’s always got her phone out, and she’s texting Teddy before Harry can text Ginny and Tonks to ask them.

 

Just after Ivy’s eleventh birthday, they have to decide what to do for a wand. Ivy is, understandably, upset at the possibility. “None of them are going to do anything,” she says. “And then the wandmaker….”

“He likely already knows,” Voldemort says. “Wandmakers are nearly seers.”

“Oh,” she says flatly. And when she doesn’t say anything more, Harry and Voldemort look to one another in silent negotiation.

“Well, you definitely need some sort of wand,” Harry says. “Want mine? I’m probably overdue for another.”

She considers. “No,” she says. “I’ll get a new one. But you can’t come with me.”

“Ivy….” Voldemort’s brow furrows.

“I need to do it alone.”

“No, you don’t. Of course you don’t.”

“I’m going to.”

And that’s as far as they get. The three of them go to Diagon Alley to shop for school supplies that weekend. And when they reach Ollivander’s, Ivy pushes her bag of textbooks into Harry’s arms before marching in ahead of them. They could have followed, but – it seemed so important to her that they didn’t.

But Voldemort had gone in the day before, to tell Ollivander precisely how Ivy getting a wand is going to go, that he can give her any wand and tell her anything about it, but she’s not leaving without one. But Ivy is never going to know that.

Voldemort stops in at Gringotts for diplomatic reasons; Harry goes to WWW. Somehow, in the two months since Harry and Voldemort had learned of everything, they hadn’t gone back to Fred and George yet. “Tell them thank you,” Voldemort had murmured before they’d split up, so that’s what Harry is here now to say. Somehow.

Weekends in Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes are busy, so it takes a bit of wandering around the shop before he finds Fred and George demonstrating a new line of Sweating Scarves. “That’s horrific,” Harry says, when the twins step back, George offering him the clammy scarf. “We’re here with Ivy, picking up school supplies – she’s getting a wand, I just thought I’d drop in – “

And his face must give him away, because George claps a hand to his shoulder. “Come to the backroom with us, we’ve got something to show you.”

When the door is warded, all of Harry’s words spill out at once. “Ivy told us, ah, a few months ago? She needed her letter. And she’s been at this for so long and we’d never even noticed. And she’s got this entire notebook of tricks, and this entire box of things, and she said you’ve done it all for her – “ He stops to take a breath. “So thank you. Really. Thank you.”

Fred presses Harry onto a stool with a little pat on the back. “Ivy’s great. Dunno where she gets it,” he adds with a cheeky grin. “And she’s done a lot himself. She showed you the summoning chalk? Her idea. Our joint execution. Really, we should be putting her name on the patents.”

“We really should,” George says thoughtfully. “But yeah, Harry, she’s great. She’ll do fine at Hogwarts. I expect you’ll pass on all your own tricks and gimmicks?” he asks, raising his eyebrows.

“That’s the plan, yeah. Though we’ve warned her they’re for getting _out_ of trouble more often than getting into it.”

“Wet blanket,” George complains, slinging the sweating scarf at him. Harry only just barely dodges.

 

When they reconvene, Ivy presents a larch wand, polished so its twisting grain is prominent. “You like it?” Harry asks, instead of asking how it went, really.

“Yeah. I like the handle.” She flips it over to show off the feathery carving. “Because it’s phoenix inside.”

“Nice.” And that does make him happy, to think she will share their core. “Animals first, or lunch?”

Lunch is wizard-made pad see ew, fried with peach blossoms and horntail beans (thankfully named for their scale-like shape, and not, as Ivy’s favorite joke went, harvested from real horntails). “Can I get a pseudodragon?” Ivy asks, twirling her noodles around her plate.

“You already know the answer to that,” Voldemort says.

“But they’ve got those tiny whiskers…!”

“So do cats.”

She slumps, albeit with a grin, knowing she’s defeated. “Think I’ll bring a snake, actually. Q said Polaris wasn’t hard to hide.”

“No, she wasn’t. We will build another terrarium.”

“Thanks. Can I help?”

Voldemort looks at her curiously. “Yes. Of course.”

“Hey.” Harry nudges her elbow with his. “I saw Fred and George earlier.”

Her eyes go dark and wary. “You did?”

“Yeah. And… they’re really impressed with you. That’s all.”

Even though they’re talking in Parseltongue, and there’s a privacy charm around their table, they still can’t speak as freely as they do at home. But Ivy’s face splits into a grin, showing off her dimples. “Yeah,” she says, and reaches for her milkshake.

 

Before Aura and Cori arrive home from Hogwarts and the twins from university, they have to ask Ivy whether she wants them to know. “It would be useful,” Harry says. “Cori can pass on all her notes – I really don’t think Aura is going to be a Prefect, but if she is she can cover for you – and it would just be _easier_ for you,” he concludes in a sigh. Ivy had been open about being a squib at home these past few months; he didn’t want her to shove all that back inside herself now.

A pucker of thoughtfulness, then she shakes her head. “Not yet.”

“Alright.”

She re-packs her chest of everything she’s collected. Voldemort puts pocket charms and extension spells on it, and then it gets shoved back into her wardrobe.

Cori comes home from first year bursting with ideas, and Aura returns from her exchange year in Prague with a lot of photos, new friends, and some passable Czech. And then Q and Phaedra come home from uni, full-fledged adults, and it is fascinating and wonderful to watch. And Ivy falls back into her role as the youngest child, sweet and vibrant.

And then they can’t talk of her magic for the rest of the summer, except behind closed doors. Ivy says she’s got everything, that she can do it alone, and Harry believes her.

 

And then it’s August 31st, and their three youngest are packing. Cori had handed all of her first year texts off to Ivy, who’s still flipping through them as though she could do anymore to prepare. Meanwhile, she’s got a rainbow boa she’s named Cinnabar wrapped around her shoulders, and she’s speaking to her in meandering Parseltongue: “The castle can get cold but there’s heating charms in the terrarium… I’ll catch you frogs out of the pond on weekends… You can meet Teddy, I bet he can make his hair match you….”

Harry knocks on the open doorframe. “Sorry,” he says when she jumps. “Abba and I have got something for you.”

“Okay.” She climbs to her feet, reaching for her snake. “Cinna too?”

“Ah, sure?” He brings them both into the master bedroom.

It’s everything they can give her: the invisibility cloak, the Marauder’s map. “Look,” Harry says, pulling the map before himself. “You’ll need your wand – it’s not a spell,” he assures her. “ _I solemnly swear I am up to no good._ ”

And the map unfurls itself, sketching the thin lines of the castle’s layout. “Ooh,” Ivy takes it up.

“The castle is nearly empty now,” Voldemort says, looking over her shoulder. “But it tracks people as well. The faculty are convened in the library, there.” He points.

“And ghosts, and Peeves, and sometimes animals. I used it to be out of bed past curfew a lot, but, ah….”

Ivy smiles at Harry. “I won’t get caught,” she promises.

“Great. Also, look. I had to draw in a room – “ Really, he’d had to go to Remus and ask how, and Remus had had to reverse engineer the sort of ink they’d used a half-century earlier, writing to the map itself for clues. It had been ridiculous. “There’s a room on the seventh floor, this one corridor. It’s called the Room of Requirement. Just walk past it three times, thinking about what you need, and it’ll give it to you. We got magic and stuff out of it. So. Ah. It should help.”

“How did you find it?” she asks, eyes wide.

“There was this house elf,” Harry says, smiling a bit. “It was a year that we had to learn Defense in secret, we needed a place to practice…. How did _you_ find it?” he asks Voldemort.

“I was out late as a prefect often enough. I would bring snakes with me, who knew the castle better than I did.”

“God,” Harry sighs. “Okay. So when you’re done, fold it back up and say _Mischief managed_. That’s it.”

“Cool.” She takes it. “And the cloak.”

“Yeah.” Harry runs it through his fingers, not handing it over yet. He’d had to tell all his children no before – he’d put it on their Samhain mantel every year, and they always wanted to take it for themselves afterward. “Don’t tell them you’ve got it, okay? Unless you need to. And this won’t keep people from hearing you, or from using tracking charms, or seeing you on the map. Oh, also pretty much all the professors I had know I owned this, so – they may be suspicious right off.”

“You didn’t even keep it a secret?”

“I did, for awhile. And then there was a war, and there were more important things than secrets.”

“Oh.” By now all their children know of the war, of how Harry and Voldemort came together at all. Ivy had taken it badly for a few weeks, but she wasn’t going to engage it now. Draping the cloak over her hand so it vanishes, she asks, “Can I show Teddy? And Ruby?”

“Yes, if they know how to keep it to themselves.”

“They do,” she promises.

“Good. Great. Write us if you need anything.”

“And your portkey will still work within the castle,” Voldemort says. All the girls have portkeys, because – well, their children could credibly be the target of violence. “It will bring you to my office in the Ministry.”

“I know.” And then Ivy says, and she slides off the bed, carrying the cloak and map to be packed in a secret part of her trunk.

 

September 1. The entire Weasley clan meets in the station as usual: Aura is in fifth year with Fred’s son Julian and Percy’s daughter Lucy (and the former is a Prefect and the latter is not, which was a crisis for all parents involved). Ginny and Tonks have brought Teddy. Andromeda and Ted have come with Molly and Arthur, proud grandparents beaming over their grandchildren. Eventually Luna wanders up with her twins Grainne and Finn, and Pansy with Ruby.

They need to get their trunks on the train. “Ivy,” Voldemort says, hand on her shoulder. “Pick up the front end, and I will levitate the back.”

Maybe it wouldn’t be conspicuous that Ivy couldn’t levitate her trunk before her first year. Her classmates had a range of ability at this point, as the primary education offered to magical children didn’t emphasize praxis. But her levitation powder only really worked on things smaller than cubic foot. “Okay.”

Ruby points at a window near the rear of the train. “Ours are in there. Hurry up, before someone else takes your spot.”

(Many of her other friends were shy around Voldemort, more as the Minister than as a past Dark Lord or whatever. Not Ruby. It always made Ivy laugh.)

So they enter the train, where only a few more students are dropping off their trunks as their families still mill along the platform. Voldemort gets a few nods from other students; he ignores them. Into the cabin where Ruby and Grainne and Finn have already put their trunks.

Closing the cabin door, Voldemort turns to Ivy. “Do not get sorted into Slytherin,” he says, blunt. “They will eat you alive.”

“Why?”

“For a great many reasons. Please don’t,” he re-iterates. “You are an heir of Slytherin regardless of where you are sorted. Don’t take on unnecessary burdens.”

They haven’t had a Slytherin yet: Q was in Hufflepuff, Phaedra and Cori both Ravenclaw, Aura a Gryffindor. Whatever Voldemort thought of not having a Slytherin, he’d kept it to himself.

“Okay,” Ivy says, and then she slips her arms around Voldemort’s sides, hugging hard. He is bony and he is awkward at touch, and years ago Aura had started hugging him to tease him really, and now it’s less of a joke and more just a… thing.

“You are very brave.”

“Sometimes,” she says, into the heavy cloth of his robes.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! Welcome! I love this story, it’s going to be the conclusion of all my next gen Harrymort kidfic. You should be able to read it without reading any of Cicatrization or How Many Snakes Do We Need to Turn a House into a Home, but if you want some more background on the politics and setting of this story, there’s a cheat sheet [here](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U6ozR0G9Zzw1_NCQrMC2bOO21kyzpS4d9jLO4HhNZCw/).
> 
> I have loved the premise of a squib faking their way through the magical world for a long time. This story is inspired by a few stories:
> 
> [This Pottermore page,](https://www.pottermore.com/writing-by-jk-rowling/scottish-rugby) just search for squib, it’s got the canonical story of the squib who made it all the way to Hogwarts before being found out.
> 
> [he will have power the dark lord knows not, by dirgewithoutmusic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5579962). Beautiful story of Harry as a squib but still the BWL attending Hogwarts.
> 
> [This post, also by dirgewithout music,](http://ink-splotch.tumblr.com/post/104058597984) of another squib making it through Hogwarts.
> 
> [Sparks at my Fingertips, by Drel_Murn](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9230822/chapters/33420516). The ao3 version is currently being rewritten, but it links the longer original on ffn.
> 
>  
> 
> Finally, come find me on tumblr, at [sofiabanefics](https://sofiabanefics.tumblr.com). Thanks for reading!


	2. Year One

On the train ride to Hogwarts, her stomach starts to feel funny. She skips lunch, instead picking Cinnabar out of her terrarium and tucking her into the hood of her robe to walk the train’s corridor for a bit. “I’ll be back,” she tells her friends.

“Can I have your sopapillas?” Cori asks.

Ivy turns to roll her eyes at her sister. But also: “Sure.” She goes.

The farthest a squib has ever made it into Hogwarts is to the sorting hat. She’d looked it up. And then it had been announced to the entire school that he hadn’t belonged, that they had to put him on the train back home. And if that happened to her… she doesn’t know what she’d do next.

She’s got matches up her sleeve. She could always set the hat on fire.

No, that’s dramatic and unhelpful, she knows that. If she gets turned away… she wouldn’t even need a train, she could just activate the portkey on a chain at her throat and vanish from the Great Hall. And _that_ idea is satisfying enough to make her feel better.

There are still sopapillas left when she returns to the cabin. Harry and Voldemort had made them two days prior, because they both cooked to get rid of restless energy. At least all the girls benefited from it, Ivy thinks as she bites into one.

 

They pull into Hogsmeade. Cori and the Lovegood twins go one way; Ruby and Teddy and Ivy the other. It helps, that Ivy can _feel_ the magic of Hogwarts stirring to meet her. She needs to be here.

She’s been to the castle a number of times – Voldemort will go to fix its magic, or Harry will go for tea with Hagrid and McGonagall – but she’s never seen it like this, glowing in the dark night before the Scottish mountains. She takes in the scenery as though it slakes her thirst.

Into the castle, lining up by name. They listen politely to the sorting hat’s song. (“ _Your deepest hopes, your darkest fears, your dreams realized and thwarted – I’ll see it all and more to come – approach, you will be sorted!_ ”) And then Professor Flitwick, now Deputy Headmaster, beckons them up.

Ivy claps when Teddy is sorted into Hufflepuff. When he reaches the table, his hair goes from teal to an obnoxious yellow, provoking laughter from the students looking. He shoots a grin back at Ivy.

There’s three more students between Teddy and Ivy, and then she’s standing before Professor Flitwick. “Livia Gaunt-Potter,” he reads from his parchment, and she could cry in relief that her name’s even _on_ there, that she got this far.

But now the hat –

She’d decided long ago that blunt and unapologetic was the way to handle it, that she wasn’t about to make excuses for anything. The hat sort of tickles when it’s dropped onto her head.

“ _Ah_ ,” the hat says in her ear. “ _You’ve made it as far as the last squib. Well done_.”

 _I’ll make it through Hogwarts_ , she thinks back. _Congratulate me then._

“ _Perhaps, perhaps…. A squib and an heir, what a delightful contradiction. Your castle, yet you haven’t got the magic to control it_.”

At this, she rolls her eyes. Heir of Hogwarts means little these days; all the Founders’ families had signed away their rights to the Ministry centuries ago. _It’s my castle_ , she agrees. _I’m only here for an education._

“Yes,” the hat muses, looking through all her inventions. “ _Very impressive. Well, Livia Gaunt-Potter, I wish you the best of luck._ Slytherin!”

Oh. _Oh_. She’d made it. She only hears a fraction of the cheering and – well, other reactions – as she slips from the stool to join the Slytherins’ table. The Head Girl this year is a Slytherin and she shakes her hand before Ivy moves toward some free space farther back. Her ears still rush with blood.

Slytherin. She thought she’d spend more time beneath the hat. They hadn’t even discussed which house she wanted to be in. But… to be honest, it would have been Slytherin anyway. Not just because she would do anything she was told she couldn’t do. Not just because the family of Slytherin needed one actual Slytherin child among them. This suited her, the cunning resourceful ambitious house. She thinks she’ll grow to like it.

Ruby Rinaldi-Parkinson is also sorted into Hufflepuff, and she goes to sit by Teddy, and they both make sad faces at her. It will be fine – Ivy’s been good at making friends before, and anyway the school didn’t seem as segregated as her parents said it had once been.

She ends up seated between two other first years – Meredith Pritchard and Dashiell Flint. They’d been in the same primary school but not the same classes, so they hover like vague acquaintances in each others’ presence. And finally the Headmistress rises to welcome them, and then the feast materializes. Conversation bursts out immediately.

“I need to write my mum,” Meredith says, scooping asparagus on her plate. “She and Dad had a bet. He said Slytherin, she said Hufflepuff. I dunno which I wanted more.”

“Well, you’re here,” Dashiell shrugs.

“Guess so. Were you stuck too?” Meredith asks Ivy. “You looked like you were arguing.”

“Yeah,” Ivy lies easily. “Between here and – Gryffindor.” It seems the most plausible.

Meredith gives her a wide smile. “So you’re a massive show-off, then, too?”

Ivy smiles back. “Definitely.”

But after the feast, she has to run to catch Teddy and Ruby. She had lived the past three years of her life with them. Teddy was essentially _family_. It was weird to be apart. “Congratulations,” Teddy says when she pulls them both into a niche. “Your dad finally gets a Slytherin.”

“Yeah, he does. Tonks will be pleased for you.”

“I think so. Hey, charm your tie.”

She looks down. Madam Malkin’s sold ties that could be charmed with the house colors after sorting, for incoming students. “I left my wand in my trunk. I’ll do it tonight.”

“Nah, here. _Tinguo_.” He makes her tie go green.

“Cheers.” She wonders if she can get him to do the rest of her ties, somehow. “… Ruby?”

Ruby’s not normally quiet. “Mum wanted me to a Slytherin,” she says. Offering a weak smile, she nods to the tie. “Trade you?”

God, Ivy wishes Ruby had been in Slytherin too. Her dormmates seem fine, but. “She’ll be happy for you. Promise.”

“No, it’s just…. I’ll tell you later. We should go meet everyone else. So they don’t think we’re weird.” Ruby tucks her dark hair behind her ear. “Hey, we can walk most of the way to our common rooms together, at least.”

They part at a suit of armor shouting directions – “Hufflepuffs to my left! Slytherins to my right! _My_ right, you ignorant boy,” it shouts at one first year, who bursts into tears just as Professor Slughorn approaches, and then it gets silenced for the rest of the night.

Slughorn. Ivy gives him a small smile. “Ms. Gaunt-Potter,” he says, offering his hand. “At last I get one of you in my own house. Of course your sisters have all been a pleasure in class….”

As Ivy knows that Q had spent half of her time in Potions melting cauldrons by testing alternatives to animal products as ingredients, she very much doubts this. “Thank you, sir.”

“Will you be writing your parents?”

“… Yes?”

“ _Do_ give them my best.” And then he hurries off to direct some more lost students.

Harry and Voldemort had told her – warned her? – about Slughorn, celebrity-obsessed for a certain value of celebrity. Apparently he’d taught them both, and apparently something really bad had happened between him and Voldemort once, because Slughorn is somehow still terrified of him.

She really hopes her father has never tried to kill her potions teacher. It may make class awkward.

Their possessions have already been brought to their dorms; Ivy drags her trunk to the farthest bed. Meredith is on one side, then a girl named Miori who’s currently pinning up her hair, and then a girl named Saskia who’s arranging her robes in her wardrobe. It’s a good idea, hanging her clothes before bed, so she pops open her trunk.

Saskia peers at her things. “Daddy send you here with any good dark magic?”

Only technically. There are confusion and memory loss powders somewhere in her trunk, but Voldemort warned her she would probably never need to use them, that it would be better to be outed than to do something awful (and likely, criminal) like that to anyone. “No,” Ivy says, shuffling Cinnabar’s terrarium beneath a blanket as she lifts out her robes. “Did yours?”

Saskia scowls. “You know they didn’t.”

Ivy doesn’t know a damn thing about Saskia – she’d gone to primary school in Scotland, not England, by the sound of it, so they’d never even met before. This isn’t a great start. “How about you, Miori?”

“No,” she says. “No dark magic. Only a cat. I’m putting his box in the loo – “

“Ew,” Saskia objects.

“Grow up,” she snaps, and her tortoiseshell cat follows her in.

Meredith flips on a radio she’d brought, tuning it until she finds a mixed magic and Quotie station. “ _Ha_. Dad said nothing would work this far out.”

“Nice,” Ivy says, though the radio makes her miss her mobile – not just for stupid things, but to look up tricks and workarounds when she needed to. She’d asked Voldemort – if anyone had the magic to make mobiles work at Hogwarts, he did – but he said it was a matter of school policy and therefore out of his hands. Next term, maybe, Ivy will smuggle in a phone and try to make it work herself. But for now, she’s got a lot of books.

Books with suspicious titles, she’s realizing as she lines them up above her desk. What first year witch would bring _Boom! Chemistry Made Easy_ to Hogwarts? Quietly she takes off all the dust jackets, leaving bare books on her shelf. Slightly obnoxious, but less conspicuous.

She sleeps with Cinnabar on her pillow beside her. And when she can hear that all her dormmates are asleep, she turns to look into the boa’s dark beady eyes. “Made it,” she whispers in Parseltongue. It will get harder before it gets easier, but… she’s made it.

\---

Ivy writes them her first weekend at Hogwarts. Really, it had been a relief that they hadn’t been floo’ed late in the evening of September 1 telling them to come retrieve their squib daughter, but Harry had spent the next few days feeling anxious on her behalf, anyway. Finally Voldemort had pulled some very rigid Occlumency between them, told him he wasn’t helping, and said he should take a few extra raids at work to keep his mind off things. Instead, he spends the rest of the week on a mini-holiday with Q and Phaedra, visiting Kolkata before they must return to university for the semester.

But now it’s Sunday morning, and the house is quiet with just the two of them in it, and they’re both drinking coffee and reading Ivy’s letter before them. Her first paragraph – _I’m a Slytherin, and Teddy and Ruby are both Hufflepuffs_ – had made them both stop, albeit for different reasons.

“Poor Ivy,” Harry mutters. He’d hoped she’d be in a house with at least one of them, so they could be her confidant and partner in classes. “I haven’t heard who else got sorted into Slytherin....” And he’s scanning the rest of the letter for names of her housemates.

“I have,” Voldemort says, and it surprises Harry how grim he sounds. “Flint’s grandson, Rowle’s granddaughter. Possibly others.” He scrubs a hand over his forehead. “I told her not to get sorted into Slytherin.”

“You can’t tell her where to get sorted – “

“Well, clearly not successfully. I have been – relieved that none of our children have been in Slytherin before now. I assume hostilities still linger, and I didn’t want our daughters to bear such a burden. Or to be exposed to it at all.”

Harry exhales, sorting out his feelings before he speaks. “I wish you’d told me.”

“Which part?”

“All of it. I just… expected you’d want them in Slytherin.”

“They are heirs regardless of where they are sorted. It didn’t matter.”

“Okay.” He’s still reading, but Ivy doesn’t say anything more of her sorting. But then she can’t write of everything freely anyway, just in case.

_Classes have mostly been easy. Professor Slughorn says hello. We just studied how to trim and water plants in Herbology this week, and we got to use the telescope for the first time in Astronomy last night. I think Transfiguration and Defence will be difficult, but Charms is easier than I expected._

On this Harry nearly smiles. Ivy had spent months with her nose in her charms textbook; he thinks she can fake almost anything in it by now. She’d already worked harder than he ever had as a student. Hell, she might’ve worked harder than Tom Riddle had already.

_I went with Cori to the lake yesterday, and we fed chicken to the giant squid. Simone, one of our prefects, says he doesn’t come near the common room windows often, but the mermaids and grindylows do. I asked her if she’d ever held up notes for the mermaids and she said no, that it is against the rules after the last time the Slytherins had tried to communicate with them._

_I’m having tea with Professor Hagrid next week, I’ll tell him you say hi. Cinnabar says that she misses our back garden but that her terrarium is very nice. I haven’t been all the way inside yet, because my dormmates don’t know I’ve got it. I hope they like snakes._

_I’ll write to you next week. Bye!_

_Love, Livia Felicitas Gaunt-Potter ♥_

“Good,” Harry says, when he reaches her curlicued signature at the bottom of the parchment. At Voldemort’s skeptical look: “It is.”

“I am quite happy for her. Everyone else may be a problem.”

“Yeah, well, we’ll deal with it. …Do you know where they are now?” Harry asks, setting aside the letter. “Rowle and Flint. Er, any of them.”

After the war, the Death Eaters had first been imprisoned, then released into a Ministry-directed Order that restricted them either from dark magic or political rebellion. They couldn’t keep so many Death Eaters in Azkaban, especially since a great number of them had had children. So the Order of Lua Saturni had been a sort of probation. Scrimgeour had sworn them in himself; now it was managed by Marcellus Hart, who’d been the prosecutor in many of their trials.

And for his own surrender, Voldemort had agreed to never have significant contact with the Death Eaters again, certainly not to mobilize them and really not to interact more than necessary at all. Nobody had wanted to – the Death Eaters had been neatly severed from Voldemort when he took an armistice for himself and left them all in prison – but, well, their world was small and it was difficult to avoid anyone forever.

“You should ask your peers where Marcus or – whatever Rowle’s daughter’s name was, she was still young – “

“Gotlinde.” A third year when he had been an eighth. The only daughter of a single father, and a great catalyst to releasing the Death Eaters, since Harry was opposed to functionally orphaning any more children, even for supposed justice.

“Where Marcus Flint and Gotlinde Rowle have ended up. Werner Flint joined the Department of Finance last year, and somehow it was _still_ a production negotiating whether we were allowed a meeting alone together. Harry, I swear to you, even if I wanted the Death Eaters back, Flint is not the one I would approach first. Or tenth.”

This makes Harry laugh, even though really it’s grim. “Sorry. I just assumed people, ah, stopped caring?” _I just assumed they trusted you now_ , he doesn’t say.

“Hart is at least as paranoid as Moody. I’m sure all the Death Eaters are having a trying time under his watch.”

“Right.” And now Ivy is sharing a dorm with Thorfinn Rowle’s granddaughter. “I see why you didn’t want them in Slytherin,” he admits. “But if you had told me, I would’ve backed you up, you know.”

“As though it would have done anything but strengthen Ivy’s resolve.” He summons the coffee pot with a flick of his fingers. “Perhaps I should have told her anywhere but Gryffindor. It would have been safer.”

\---

Ivy hadn’t been lying when she’d written to her parents that classes had been easy so far. She had come so prepared – arguably overprepared, though that won’t always be the case – that in the first few days her real challenge had been acting like she’d struggled just enough before putting a smudge of levitation powder on the end of her feather, and palming the matchstick for a needle in a single motion. She doesn’t want to get a reputation as a prodigy, after all. Ideally, she doesn’t want to be noticed in Charms or Transfiguration or DADA at all.

But she feels far more normal in every other class. The Astronomy Tower’s telescope is a hundred times more powerful than the one they had at home, and she loses herself in looking out at the Pleaides. Merope had been a squib too, at the end of her life, Voldemort had said. Ivy can barely find anything about Merope’s Gaunt existence – she’d been homeschooled, or more likely, not schooled at all – so she began seeking out her namesake instead.

The soft nuzzleplants they’d begin with in Herbology had been nice (though Saskia had snorted and said Professor Spiraea must think they were babies to want to play with these things). What had once been History was now combined with Civics, and Professor Su had given Ivy a wary look on the first day when she said they’d be covering through the war, so that’s going to be awkward. In Potions, Slughorn is torn between doting on Ivy and avoiding her completely, so that’s _more_ awkward and she hopes she hasn’t got to go to him as head of house for anything anytime soon. And in DADA, Professor Callahan tells her as she’s packing up that she hopes Ivy has an Auror’s sense of defensive magic. And not, the point is clear, her _other_ father’s rather offensive magic.

The first month of classes are easy – everyone is settling in, everyone’s got a range of talents, and Ivy has prepped is still mostly easy. Until late in October, when Ivy enters the Transfiguration classroom to find Professor Bulstrode standing before them with a tub.

It’s one of the joint classes Slytherin has with Hufflepuff, and that may make it better – though how can she get Ruby or Teddy to cover for whatever this impromptu lesson may be? – and may make it worse, because at least the Slytherins typically have the good graces to ignore each other. She takes her seat.

“You all prepared the reading to transfigure roses into daisies,” Professor Bulstrode says when they are all settled. “And we’ll return to that lesson next week.” (And Ivy is annoyed, because she’d had to soak daisy seeds in growth serum last night to prepare, and now the seeds inside the tiny pocket under her sleeve cuff are going to go to waste, but whatever Professor Bulstrode has planned now is worse.) “But given how much you all have struggled with conceptualizing space during your spells – “ She lifts the lid of the tub to reveal a stack of paintings, still life paintings of objects. “Today is an exercise in transfiguring objects between two and three dimensions.”

Oh god. She couldn’t. She’d accepted a long time ago that there would be times when she’d just look bad at magic, and Voldemort had told her to attempt to fail plausibly in those classes instead. She doesn’t know what failing plausibly in this circumstance looks like. So she is sucking the end of her quill as Bulstrode demonstrates the three possible spells they should try on their paintings.

And then they file up to the front to choose their own paintings. Ruby takes one of a water jug and a pomegranate; Teddy takes one of a paint palette and paintbrushes. Finding that there are no paintings of daisies, which would be too easy, Ivy instead takes a painting of a jewelry box.

She ends up watching other students first, looking to see if a failed spell shrunk the painting or vanished it or incinerated it. And then Ruby nudges her elbow. “Who are you looking at?”

“No one.” No one in particular. Maybe a dull Slytherin named Hanson a bit more than most, because he never got the spells right anyway. She takes up her wand, running her thumb over the handle as though for luck. “Grandesco.”

Nothing happens. Of course nothing happens. Ivy shrugs; Ruby shrugs back. And then a corner of Teddy’s palette begins to protrude from the canvas, and Bulstrode comes over to (approximately) congratulate him, telling the rest of the class that it’s not that difficult.

Ivy is studying her canvas. She hasn’t got anything like it on her – she’s got gold earrings in, but they’re small hoops rather than the dangling jewel-set ones in the painting. Nothing like the pearl necklace or the cameo brooch. “Grandesco,” she casts again just as Bulstrode is striding out of earshot.

Sometimes she can trick herself into believing she feels magic stirring beneath her skin. She’s not _completely_ devoid of magic, only mostly, but she knows she’s the sort of squib who will never be able to cast voluntary spells. Harry and Voldemort had fought over the possibility of getting her tested for a precise aptitude, but Harry says Voldemort is holding onto unrealistic hopes, that all those courses and tests for squibs are a scam and he should raid them for fraud…. Regardless. Ivy’s wand sits, warm but docile, in her palm. A few more tries, just enough for people to notice she’s not getting it, then she needs another plan.

She’s got a few loaded quills from Fred and George – the hollow shafts hold some magic components, just a pinch each but she doesn’t need much. Pretending to snap the nib of her real quill, she swears under her breath and reaches into her bag.

She’s got one with an invisibility potion – that was how she was going to dispose of the rose if it had been too big to palm. There’s one with shrinking solution that she’ll need for Charms later today. Petrification mist, maybe. Gilding potion, better. And growth potion.

The last two, she pulls off the nib of each and tips a few drops of potion into the cap. Then, as she thinks nobody is watching, she smears the solutions over the canvas.

Immediately her painting begins to grow and warp, the canvas stretching apart where the potion touched it. “Oh god,” says Saskia with a cruel laugh behind her, and maybe it’s embarrassing to look like she’s mucked up her spell, but it’s better than doing nothing at all. Bulstrode approaches, studying the gilded part of the canvas now ballooning off the surface. “Good start, Gaunt.” And she steps away again.

And Ivy has to stare after her for a moment, because obviously this isn’t a good start. This is a mess. A golden oval-shaped bubble sits on the canvas where the jewelry box had once been painted. But, well, it’s more than some of her classmates manage that day. Failing plausibly, Voldemort had told her.

But when they’re packing up for the day, Teddy prods her painting. “What was that?” he asks lowly.

“What?”

“You put something on it.”

Teddy is so good, and she likes him so much, that it is going to suck to lie to him. “Just the same spells as you. I need to practice,” she says with a shrug. And Teddy still looks dubious, but turns to repack his bag.

\---

A few days before Halloween, Cori grabs Ivy in the Great Hall. “Want to come to my Samhain fire?”

“… Is that allowed?”

Cori makes a face. “Do you actually care? And it’s not illegal. It may be against Hogwarts policy.”

Of the five of them, Cori cares most about traditional magics. She would stay out late at their Samhain fire with Voldemort while the rest of them scattered – Ivy trick or treating for the past few years (the tradition had been slow to reach wixen communities, which was a waste) and Aura and the twins out to parties. Cori’s got her own tarot deck, she’s going to take Divination next year, she knows what all the different sorts of crystals do. So of course she’s got a Samhain fire.

“Yeah,” Ivy says. “On the grounds?”

“I _wish_ ,” Cori sighs. “Our common room. Just come back with us after the feast. I’ll try to convince everyone Slytherin hasn’t sent you as a spy.”

It’s a joke, obviously, but there’s been moments like this, when it’s clear every other house considers Slytherin to be… malicious, if not innately then at least often. “If that diadem goes missing by the end of the night, I didn’t do it,” Ivy says, and then they’ve got to run off to classes in different directions.

 

But Samhain is a reunion of sorts, of the family and friends who’d populated their home. Aura brings Julian Johnson and Lucy Jin-Weasley, which is useful because Julian is one of Ravenclaw’s prefects. Cori brings Grainne and Finn Lovegood, all Ravenclaws. And Teddy has come to Samhain before, because they’ll joke that Harry loves Teddy more than his own children. They all take a corner sofa in the common room, waiting for people to crash after the feast.

Their mantel consists of a few pieces of jewelry that had belonged to James and Lily – Cori had taken Lily’s sapphire necklace, Aura had taken James’s pocket watch. The invisibility cloak always held a place of pride in their Samhain – and Ivy thinks that Harry must be missing it at this moment – but she’s not allowed to tell her sisters that he’d given it to her. It would raise a lot of questions, anyway.

Cori and the Lovegood twins know the ceremony best, so they line up apples and pomegranates interspersed with crystals on the great hearth of Ravenclaw’s common room. Then they’ve got to extinguish the fire to relight it without magic. “I can do it,” Ivy says, reaching for the bit of flint they’d use. This fire glows differently than the ones lit by magic. Warmer.

Finn drops calendula, hyssop, verbena onto the flames until the entire space is fragrant. Aura is the oldest, so they look to her for the invocation. “Ancestors, pull apart this veil – “

“No,” Julian interrupts. “Say it in Snake.”

She grins at him. “In _Snake_?”

“Yeah.”

So she begins again Parseltongue. “Ancestors, pull apart this veil. We entreat you to join us tonight. May you bring us wisdom and grace to see us through this winter.”

Grainne: “Blood that has come before us, wash through our veins. Minds that have come before us, enlighten us. Flesh that has come before us, strengthen us.” The rest of them look at her; she shrugs. “Mum said that’s the one she grew up with.”

“Cool.” Leaning in, Cori drops another handful of herbs on the fire. “Want to start?”

Grainne and Finn call upon Pandora Lovegood, Lucy and Julian call upon the Weasley and Prewett great-grandparents. And then Aura and Cori and Ivy aren’t going to do a full recitation of the family tree – it is unbearably long, the Potter side back to the Peverells and the Gaunt side to Salazar Slytherin – but Cori’s got a dozen ancestors to summon.

“Wait,” Ivy says when Cori has finished her recitation. Because Harry’s got another list, one he’ll recite alone, and it feels wrong to hold Samhain without it. “Cedric Diggory, join us. Sirius Black, join us. Albus Dumbledore, join us….”

She understands what the list _is_. People Harry has lost. Mostly people killed by Voldemort, or on his orders. But in these moments Voldemort now only listens, a hand typically on Harry’s back because they will sit very close together before the fire.

Harry will put a broken mirror on the Samhain mantel each year, beside the cloak. He says it belongs to Sirius, but the girls have never figured out what it does. Ivy expects it’s sitting out at home now.

Samhain celebrations may involve music or dancing or hallucinogenic potions. The first two would wake everyone in the Ravenclaw dorms; the last – well, they would but this is already sort of illicit on its own; and anyway all the psychotropic potions stores are kept locked up and monitored. Lucy offers them a flask of firewhiskey, and the alcohol makes Ivy’s lips burn but not in a bad way as she licks it off.

When she drops a supplication into the fire, she addresses it to Merope first.

The herbal smoke grows thick, the fruits along the hearth’s edge begin to caramelize, Aura and Lucy split a pomegranate between them, whispering and giggling. Grainne is putting a braid into Julian’s hair, right over his ear. Teddy has fallen asleep, and his hair flashes different colors as he dreams, like a dog twitching in sleep.

“You must go.”

A quiet voice behind them. Ivy whips around to see the Grey Lady float through the wall, overlooking their celebration with solemnity.

“Now?” Cori says, even as she’s reaching to gather the crystals from the hearth.

“Soon. They’ll arrive soon.”

“Thank you, Lady.” The crystals are still hot; she swears and casts a cooling charm over them before stowing them back into a chest. “The rest of you, out. We’ve got it.”

“Are you sure?” Aura asks, stuffing the last of the herbs beneath the embers.

“Yeah, ‘s’fine. Don’t get detention.”

“You too.” Aura hugs Cori, and then she and Lucy are running across the way back to the Gryffindor tower.

Ivy’s woken up Teddy, who’s stumbling to his feet. “We’ve got to go.”

“Maybe it would be better if you hid,” Cori says doubtfully. “Juls can take you, Teddy, and I’ll take Ivy, and after Flitwick is back in bed – “

“No, we can get out. ‘Night.” Ivy is picking up her bookbag, barely pausing to hug Cori first. “Happy Samhain. See you tomorrow.” And then they leave all the Ravenclaws – Cori, the Lovegood twins, and Julian – to hopefully get to bed before Flitwick finds them. Ivy gives a tiny wave to the Grey Lady before they duck out.

They take a back corridor down a dusty stairwell. Halfway down, Ivy pulls off her bookbag. “Can I show you something?”

“Now?”

“Yeah. Don’t tell anyone. Especially not Aura and Cori.” She extracts the cloak from her bag.

“You didn’t put it out for Samhain….” Teddy knows it from the years on their mantel; he’s stroking a corner now.

“No, I only brought it in case.” Because regardless of how non-rule-breaking Samhain festivities themselves were, they were still out past curfew on a Tuesday. “Here, we’ll have to go slow, but he wouldn’t get caught.” At the bottom of the stairs she throws the cloak over both of them.

“Oh,” Teddy breathes, and then he’s quiet. Above them, they hear two sets of footsteps – Flitwick and maybe McGonagall – spelling open the common room. The following silence means the group had managed to pack up and return to their beds already.

So Ivy and Teddy creep downstairs, past the portraits and ghosts still watching them. The castle’s caretaker is fiddling with some wards in the Great Hall that must have been damaged in the feast. Ivy slips past him, to the dungeon corridor.

“Take it the rest of the way,” she says to Teddy, pulling the cloak off herself. “Spiraea is stricter than Slughorn.”

“Are you sure?” comes Teddy’s disembodied voice.

“Uh-huh. ‘Night.” And then she runs the rest of the way back to the Slytherin common room. Because really, Slughorn seems far too scared of Voldemort to even give his daughters detention.

Into her dorm, trying to barely open the door so the light doesn’t filter in. But it doesn’t matter. “… Ivy?” Miori asks blearily into the darkness.

“Sorry. Go back to sleep.”

“Where were you?”

Miori sounds concerned, not accusatory, and really that’s funny because so far the four of them had been as distant as possible with one another. “Out,” Ivy says. “If you want to get me in trouble with Slughorn, can you just do it in the morning?”

Miori pushes her bed’s curtain open the rest of the way. “I’m not telling,” she says.

“Okay. Good. Cheers.” Ivy goes to wash the taste of roast apple and firewhiskey from her mouth before sleep.

 

The next day, she goes to the Hufflepuff dorms after class to collect her cloak. Ruby and Teddy are pulling out textbooks for revision, but Ruby’s hand keeps slipping into Teddy’s bag, playing with a corner of the cloak.

“It’s good, isn’t it,” Ivy says, taking it to shove in her bookbag before anyone else sees.

“Take me on your next midnight adventure,” Ruby says. “I heard McGonagall came to break it up.”

“It was extracurricular study. She should be pleased.”

“Why’s Harry let you have it?” Teddy asks. ( _Harry_ because he’s got a relationship with him quite apart from his friendship with Ivy. It was good.) “And why can’t Aura and Cori know?”

She hasn’t thought of a good answer yet. “Maybe I’m the worst at not getting caught,” she demurs, even though that’s probably Aura, who perversely seems to enjoy tallying up detentions. “They gave us all going-away gifts for Hogwarts. This was mine.”

“We could go anywhere with this,” Ruby muses. “Can we wait outside the Prefects’ bath until someone says the password?”

“Yes, but also Julian would probably just tell you.”

“Or a midnight swim in the lake,” Ruby says. “We could go look in on the Slytherin common room from the other side.”

“Great. Yes. Papa used gillyweed once.”

Ruby’s eyes sparkle in a way they haven’t recently. “Yeah, tell him thanks. I suppose Aurors have got their own tricks.”

“… Yeah, they must.”

Really, it’s a good point. She’ll need to ask Harry what sort of gadgets the Aurors have, and whether any would be useful to her. Over Christmas holidays, she’ll ask.

Teddy lifts a textbook to gesture. “Revise for the DADA exam?”

“Not now.” Their first exam will have a practical component, so she already knows she’s going to fail it. She’ll at least think of a way to fail interestingly, though. “Aura’s got Quidditch practice this afternoon, think I’ll go watch. Try to have fun without me.”

“Bye,” Ruby says, not to Ivy but with a pat on her bookbag, wishing the cloak farewell.

“Nerds.” And Ivy gets out.

She does actually go to Aura’s practice – it’s Gryffindor, the entire house is full of showoffs, so it’s fun to watch them fly in deep swoops and dives over the lake. And Ivy puts Cinnabar at her neck, beneath her robe where it’s warm. “Tripping jinx,” she mutters in Parseltongue. “If it were the oil slick spell or the marble spill charm, I could do it….”

Cinnabar flicks out her tongue. “ _Who are you tripping_?”

“One another. Another student.”

“ _Ask them to trip_.”

Ivy sighs. “I wish it were that easy.”

But the practical portion is half that exam grade. She might have to consider it. Apart from exposing herself, she just doesn’t want to owe anyone who would cover for her. She scribbles in the margin of her DADA textbook as she thinks.

And then practice ends, and the team descends, and Aura lands neatly before her in the stands. “Hey bugbear.”

Ivy smiles at the childhood nickname. “Practice looked fun.”

“Yeah. Everyone assumes you’re a spy, though. Don’t tell Frost about the backspin I’m putting on the Quaffles now, it’s going to ruin his day.”

Ivy is only vaguely aware who the sixth year Keeper for Slytherin is, so she will definitely not report back to him. “Do you need to go in?”

“Nah, we’re done for now. Walk you back to the castle?”

They take the long way. It’s nice – she and Aura are four years apart, and sometimes Aura wants to be too cool to be seen with her eleven year old sister, but this time together is good.

They’re talking about Quidditch, until there’s a pause, and then Aura asks with some awkwardness, “Do people treat you alright?”

Ivy looks up, startled. She didn’t know, she couldn’t know. “… Yes?”

“Because – maybe it’s just Gryffindor, because we’re the worst sometimes – but some of them are saying you’ll take after Abba.”

Aura had switched into Parseltongue for this statement, and it makes Cinnabar stir, poking her head out of Ivy’s collar. Aura chokes on laughter. “Like _that_.”

“Cinna is a very good girl,” Ivy says firmly, patting her snake’s head. “And… what? Like dark magic?”

“I guess, yeah. People probably expected more of Q and Phae, but they were harmless, and then none of us were in Slytherin…. I still hear it sometimes, but not I’m hearing it about _you_.”

“Huh.” She kicks a stone before her, so she hasn’t got to keep eye contact as she formulates her thoughts. “It’s been fine. I mean – Slughorn is weird around you too, right?”

“ _So_ weird.”

“And Professor Callahan watches me a lot, but she’s said more about Papa and the Aurors than Abba. And my dormmates are… fine.”

“Really?”

“Uh-huh.” She pauses, sucking her lower lip into her mouth. “Abba did say not to become a Slytherin. Did he tell you that?”

Aura laughs. “I don’t think anyone ever suspected I would be. Why?”

“He said it would be complicated. That they would be – cruel. But it’s been fine.”

“He couldn’t have meant that. That all Slytherins are cruel.”

“I don’t know what he meant. But that’s what he said.”

Aura hums, not particularly convinced. “Right. But if any of them give you any grief about being evil, a good _Crucio_ upside the skull – “

“Aura!” But she is laughing.

 

She fails the practical part of her DADA exam. She’s put across from Meredith, who’s recently become friends with Saskia and it’s making her mean, so Ivy can’t even bring herself to ask Meredith to fake tripping. The extra twist of the knife is that Meredith’s own tripping jinx is fantastic, and Ivy nearly ends up on her face.

She intends to excuse herself to bed early that night, to write Harry and Voldemort. Even euphemisms and half-truths help, because she’s just got nobody else to tell these things to. But then Ruby turns up to dinner looking awful.

So Ivy is grabbing her bookbag and pulling off her tie, so that she might inconspicuously join the Hufflepuff table. Sliding in beside Teddy: “Ruby?”

She’s been crying, her nose pink and eyes watering. “Mum and Dad are finally getting a divorce. I just floo’ed with her in Flitwick’s office.”

“Good,” Teddy says firmly. Ruby’s parents haven’t gotten along for as long as they’d been friends. It seemed like a really bad home to return to, and Harry clearly thought so too, because he’d ask Ruby to stay for dinner or sleepovers as often as they could reasonably suggest. “You’re not going to have to move to Switzerland with him, are you?”

“Oh Circe, I hope not,” Ruby mutters. “No – just – I don’t know what’s next.”

In bits, they hear the floo call recounted: Pansy and her husband thought it had been best to stay together until Ruby was at school, so now they haven’t got a reason to be together anymore. Her dad’s got a manor in Switzerland; her mum’s got… less than that.

“We had a manor too once,” Ruby says darkly. “Before the Dark War. Now… well, Mum says we can live anywhere. I just….” She wipes her face on a napkin, and Ivy practically needs to read the words from her lips. “I wish she weren’t so disappointed in me.”

“Ruby – “ “She’s not – “ “Don’t say that – “ Ivy and Teddy are talking over each other at once.

The dinner table isn’t the right place to have this conversation. So Ivy shakes out an extendable pocket she keeps in her bag, filling it with fruit and bread instead of magic for once. They slip away from the table.

Into the Hufflepuff rooms, and then Teddy’s room since he couldn’t get into Ruby’s. They crowd into his bed, pulling the golden curtains closed around them. “I need to learn that silencing spell you do,” Teddy says to Ivy.

 _She_ doesn’t do anything, but the rest of her family sometimes needs privacy in the middle of public spaces, so Harry and Voldemort will drop a silencing bubble over them all. “I don’t know it yet either,” Ivy shrugs. “They’ll all be at dinner for awhile now, though.”

Ruby is agitatedly taking out her braided pigtails as she recounts the rest of the conversation: she’ll have to stay with Pansy in Britain during the school year, then maybe summers with her dad in Switzerland, and it’s probably not even worth going home for Christmas next month. “It’s probably best they’re separating, but my mum is already so disappointed in me – “

“Ruby. She’s not.”

Ruby looks to Ivy in exasperation. “She is. You’ve got no idea. It was supposed to be – I was supposed to get into Slytherin. They took away the entire house when she was in school, and she thought it would be – it would be a compromise if I were anywhere else.”

“They _took away_ the house?”

“You’re supposed to know more than I do,” Ruby says, defensive. “It was – after the second war. She wouldn’t say much about it.”

Harry and Voldemort limited how much they told their children about the war and the armistice. It was done now, it had been done for a long time, and they say while they don’t mind telling the girls of politics, it’s not something they should feel obligated to understand or answer for. So – Ivy hasn’t. “I’ve got no idea,” she admits. “Abba – Voldemort would never do something like that. I don’t think Harry would either.”

“It shouldn’t matter,” Ruby mutters. “It’s over now, it’s been over for such a long time. But Mum’s still angry. And Grandmother and Grandpapa are worse.”

“We could try the library,” Ivy offers. “But Abba says all the books about the Autumn War are wrong.”

Ruby’s mouth twitches into a smile. “He’s got to say that, hasn’t he?”

“I guess so.”

“We could ask,” Teddy says, sitting up straighter. “ _Not_ your parents,” he clarifies at Ivy’s look. “But – Ruby – your mum is friends with Professor Bulstrode, right?”

“Yes, and it’s weird.”

“Were they in school together? She must know.”

There’s a Slytherin-Hufflepuff double Transfiguration class the next day; they agree to linger afterward to ask. It’s a distraction – it’s hardly going to keep Ruby’s parents from divorcing – but Ruby’s got her heart set on making her mother happy, and this may uncover more useful knowledge.

And then Ivy’s got to second-guess all her interactions with Mrs. Parkinson. She and Harry had snarked at each other in ways that she thinks they mutually enjoy. But Voldemort had only come to the Rinaldi-Parkinson manor to drop Ivy off a few times, and Ivy remembers it as perfectly cordial. Or maybe she had just missed something. But she doesn’t want to make Ruby’s night worse, so she keeps this question to herself.

 

When the three of them wait around after Transfiguration the following day, Professor Bulstrode looks them over before saying, “Black, Gaunt, out. Parkinson, stay.”

“I’ll tell them anyway,” Ruby says, setting her jaw.

“That is your prerogative. However, I will not. Out, both of you.”

And Ivy thinks that maybe Professor Bulstrode hates her on account of Voldemort as well.

They wait for Ruby at lunch – Ivy just taking off her tie to sit with the Hufflepuffs again, because the entire house is so committed to hospitality that nobody’s going to call her on being an interloper. Teddy serves himself from a cauldron of vindaloo, then looks to Ivy seriously. “You didn’t transfigure those flowers.”

They’d finally gotten back to the flower lesson Bulstrode had pre-empted a fortnight ago. Ivy frowns at him. “It just took awhile. Transfiguration is hard.”

“No.” Teddy is sweet, but he’s got a Hufflepuff’s perseverance and bloody commitment to the truth, so this is going to be bad. “You shoved the rose up your sleeve. The daisy… I don’t know where the daisy came from,” he admits. “Ivy… why don’t you just _ask_?”

She doesn’t expect her throat to be swelling and her face going hot. “Don’t be stupid,” she says, and she’s lashing out just because she doesn’t know what else to do. “I’m doing fine.”

“Come study with us – “

“It’s not going to help,” she says, loudly enough that a few older students at the table glance over. She doesn’t care. “Just forget it.”

“Ivy – “

“ _Forget_ it,” she stresses, and Teddy looks like he might, but then she’s about to cry anyway, and she needs to get out. Grabbing her bookbag: “Tell Ruby sorry.” Getting up from the bench, she half-runs out of the Great Hall.

She ends up taking Cinnabar from her terrarium, and then going to sit in a pounding shower that drowns out her crying. She’d done so well, these past two months. She already worked harder on her classes than anyone – Torin, one of the Slytherin boys in her year, would always remark she should’ve been a Ravenclaw every time he passed her studying in the common room. Some Slytherins seemed to find hard work beneath them, like looking effortless is part of being ambitious, but Ivy doesn’t mind being the one who clearly works hard for her success.

At least she doesn’t think Teddy will go to any professors to tell them – whatever he thinks she is doing. Cheating, probably. But if he noticed, then anyone else could, too. She’s got to get better. She’s just… tired. She’s really tired.

She skips Herbology that afternoon, which is unfortunate because she loves Herbology, and then she’s got to tell both Slughorn and Spiraea at dinner that she was doing poorly, but she’s fine now, and really she doesn’t need the hospital wing and she definitely doesn’t need to have her parents called. She avoids Teddy and Ruby’s gaze from their spot at the Hufflepuff table, instead slipping into a seat beside her proper Slytherin cohort.

\---

_School is still good, but it is getting harder. Transfiguration is my hardest class. But I got perfect marks on the last Astronomy exam, and my Sticking Solution was the strongest of anyone’s in Potions._

_I am making a lot of friends. I went to the Quidditch match with my dormmates yesterday (against Hufflepuff, and we won), and I let Meredith charm green streaks in my hair for it. I would have done it with potions, but she said she wanted the practice._

_Ruby’s parents are getting divorced, and Ruby says her being sorted into Hufflepuff was already one bad thing to happen to her mum this year, and she doesn’t need another. She said her mum talks about Slytherin being closed before, and that they fought to have it reopened. Professor Bulstrode was in school with her, but she won’t tell us either. What happened?_

_Please tell Moira that Fang says hi._

_Love, Ivy ♥_

Harry scrubs his forehead. “I didn’t know about Pansy.”

“It seems like a relief for everyone.”

“Yeah. But poor Ruby.” And poor Ivy, because he knows what _school is getting harder_ actually entails. There’s another month before they’ll arrive home for Christmas holidays, and he wonders whether that is soon enough.

So they write back, saying quite plainly that if she wants a weekend at home, they can take her out of school. _And I will explain what happened to the Slytherin house then_ , Voldemort writes.

Because all of that was supposed to be finished. The Autumn War – named for the two months of battles at Hogwarts before Harry ran off with Voldemort; sometimes called the War of Revelation or the Unifying War, but the second war anyway – had taken place thirty years ago. The Slytherins who had fled Hogwarts in Harry’s eighth year as their parents had been imprisoned were all enjoying stable and un-criminal lives now. Pansy regularly coordinated playdates with them both, Merlin’s bloody balls, so if she harbored post-war resentment then she’d deeply buried it.

He thinks he will ask Malfoy, next time they’re on a raid together.

\---

Ivy doesn’t go home for a weekend, though she appreciates the offer. It was a hard week: she and Teddy are talking but not about that day, and Ruby won’t repeat what Professor Bulstrode had told her, and then Ivy just outright fails her Charms practical because she was supposed to cast a jiggling charm on a quite solid metal disk, and she couldn’t figure out how.

She keeps a list of all the spells she doesn’t yet know how to fake. Over Christmas holidays, she will take it to Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes for ideas. Writing them would be too risky. So for now, she sinks into her studying and gets uneven grades anyway.

One rainy afternoon in November, she’s packing up from double Herbology with the Gryffindors, when someone behind her jostles her elbow. Before she can turn, there’s laughter, and one boy saying to the other, “Careful, Drew, or she’ll curse you.”

Ivy turns. Drew and Porter, the two most obnoxious Gryffindors, are grinning at her. “That snake army she’s got,” Porter goes on. “Just like Daddy. Can girls be dark lords?”

Ivy looks at him very intently. “Yeah,” she says. “We can be.” She steps in, as though she may actually curse them, and they break with a holler.

Ivy gets detention for this – her first detention, which really she’s quite proud of. “Do not threaten your classmates, regardless of how credible the threat it,” Spiraea says as he hands her the detention slip. “Hagrid needs help covering the crops.”

She would have done this anyway, so she goes off pleased with herself.

This happens a few more times – always when the professor isn’t looking, always when her peers can just mutter something under their breath. “Don’t,” she snaps one morning at flying lessons, when a Ravenclaw boy is trying to pull her broom from under her.

“Or what? You’ll Crucio me?”

So Ivy flicks her hand so her hand, holstered to her forearm, slides into her palm. Aiming the useless thing: “Uh-huh. Want me to try?”

“Crazy bitch,” he breathes, and later that day when she hears the story circulated in rumors… she doesn’t stop it. Or the next time, or the next. And then, by the end of that term, she’s somehow gotten a reputation as someone who’s really good at curses and dueling, and maybe a bit immersed in dark magic. All this without ever casting a single spell.

She thinks it’s hilarious. She wants to tell Teddy and Ruby why it’s so funny, but of course she can’t. At least Voldemort will appreciate it.

She gets the best marks on the History exam, perfect score on the Astronomy exam, and extra credit for coming in to file down the spines of the stegoplantus in Herbology. And then it’s time to pack up for Christmas holidays.

“Can’t I just come home with you,” Ruby laments as she sits at the end of Ivy’s bed, watching her pack her coats and snow boots. “Home’s going to be miserable.”

“You could, you know,” Ivy tells her. “I mean, come over whenever you want. Teddy will be at Christmas already.”

“Yeah, maybe.” She’s fidgeting with something; when Ivy looks up again, she sees it’s the terrarium.

“Want to see something?” She’d kept the terrarium a secret. She’d kept a lot of secrets. Finding her wand under a pile of jumpers, she goes to press it to the top of the chest. “ _Open_.”

“Ooh – _oh_ ,” Ruby says, peering in. The floor of the terrarium is about fifteen feet down, so it all looks miniature when they’re looking at it from above.

“This is where Cinna lives,” Ivy says. “She’s probably inside that log, it’s been her favorite hiding spot this month. Here.” She’s reaching in, finding the ladder along the side. “Want to come in?”

They climb down carefully, until they’re standing in a warm and humid glen. “Cinna?” Ivy squats, peering into the log, and extracts a very sleepy boa. “My parents made this,” she tells Ruby, careful to switch back to English. “Well, they made one for Q first, because she’d never come to Hogwarts without a snake. But then a second one for me.”

Ruby is awestruck. “You could hide things in here.”

Not only _can_ she, she has. Only some spell components that aren’t sensitive to the humidity. But those are tucked away. Grinning: “I could hide _myself_ in here. …I haven’t, though,” she adds, at Ruby’s look. “No need.”

And then high above them, there’s the slam of a door. And then Saskia’s voice: “What the hell….” And Ivy and Ruby are both watching as she peers in, frowning and then laughing as she understand what she’s seeing. “You’re such a freak.” _Thunk_ , she swings the lid closed.

Ruby lets out a cry of righteous indignation. “Saskia!”

They’re probably too far down to be heard. Sighing, Ivy picks her way toward the ladder. “Can you cast lumos?” she requests.

And Ruby does, happily without questioning why Ivy can’t do it herself. Holding her wand high to illuminate the space: “She couldn’t lock us in, could she?”

“Only Parseltongue can lock and unlock it. She’s just being a bitch.”

“Parselmagic?” Ruby frowns. “I know it doesn’t matter for you, but – isn’t that illegal?”

Ivy has never heard the term Parselmagic before. It sounds… promising, really. Stashing away that question for later: “Maybe. Doesn’t matter now. Ready?”

She’s got to climb the ladder to cast _Open_ against the underside of the lid, and it lifts itself obligingly. Saskia has gone to pack her own wardrobe, but she’s laughing when Ivy and Ruby step out of the box. “Neat trick, Gaunt…. _Ooh_ ,” she says as though Ivy’s in trouble, because she’s still got Cinnabar looped around her neck.

“Go tell Slughorn, I don’t care,” Ivy says, running a hand over Cinna’s head. A flick of her tongue, but she’s quiet.

“Ew,” Saskia objects. “Why would I waste your secrets on _that_? He wouldn’t even get you in trouble, not the daughter of _V-V-_ _the Dark Lord_ ,” she does a cruel impersonation of Slughorn stumbling over Voldemort’s name.

“Blackmail. Cool.”

“You can keep your nasty snake in its nasty cage if you do one thing.”

“Yeah?”

“Teach me about dark magic.”

“Saskia!” Behind them, Ruby looks at her sharply. “You can’t. You know we can’t.”

“Hufflepuff,” Saskia sneers. “Get out, this isn’t about you anyway.”

Ivy really hasn’t got anything threatening or dangerous to offer Saskia anyway, so – “Sure,” she says, offering her hand. “Swear on it?”

Ruby stays, then, as their bonder. It’s not a very serious vow – it’s one that Ivy’s got in an OWLs level Charms book (“Are you serious,” Saskia mutters when Ivy takes it from her shelf) – and the only consequence for breaking it is one panic attack _lasting not more than one hour._ Still, it feels like ritual, like old and traditional magic. The sort of magic Slytherins should be doing anyway.

Briefly Ivy wonders if squibs _can_ be a part of vows. But then the blue-green light tugs itself into a bow around their wrists, and then it’s done.

“Dark magic,” she says when they step apart, each wiping off their clasped hands. “I’ve only brought a few books from home….”

“You’ve got the entire Black library. Bring me back something.”

Ivy stares. Harry had inherited everything from his godfather, but it’s not like that was well-known or noteworthy or anything. “Sure. What sort?”

“The sort not in the Hogwarts library.”

Behind them, Ruby’s gone quiet, folding Ivy’s jumpers as though in silent protest. Ivy should get her out. “Fine. Yeah. I’ll look over the holidays.”

“Good.”

To Ruby: “Teddy said he’ll meet us for dinner at the hump-backed witch. Coming?”

“Yeah.”

So Cinna gets replaced in her terrarium, which gets pushed under Ivy’s bed. They leave.

And when they’re out of earshot, Ruby says, “Ivy, what are you doing?”

“What? I won’t give her anything dangerous. Not that she could manage it anyway. It’s just fun for her to pretend she’s, whatever, edgy.”

Ruby only sighs, pushing her dark hair out of her eyes. “Don’t let – well, anyone catch you smuggling in dark magic.”

“They won’t.”

“And don’t let the _Dark Lord Gaunt-Potter_ thing go to your head.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

\---

Christmas holidays. Harry comes with the Weasley clan to pick everyone up from the train station. And when Ivy gets off the train without her trunk, he’s in there immediately, because everyone else is levitating their belongings behind them, even the first years. “I’ll get it,” he says, taking her shoulders and pressing her in the direction of the Weasleys. “Tell Gram and Grampa about your Herbology exam.” A plausible distraction, before he climbs into the train.

When he steps back out, Aura is telling Molly about the kolaches she’ll make them, that she learned from studying abroad last year. Lucy and Julian are telling Teddy he’d have to coordinate his hair to his jumper in their Christmas photos. And Ivy is petting Cori’s cat, a tabby named Rumour. “Thanks,” Ivy grins up at Harry when he levitates her trunk before her.

“Sure. Did you have a good term?”

A thoughtful pucker of her lips. “Pretty good.” And then she goes to say bye to everyone, that she’ll see them for Christmas day soon.

 

They’re up early to prepare for Christmas day: Ivy opens her eyes to the clanging of pots and pans below her. Christmas is good, an embrace of everyone in her life who loves her. She leaves Cinna asleep on her pillow as she goes to dress.

She hasn’t spoken to Fred and George since going off to school. Fred and Angelina had been at King’s Cross to pick up Julian, but that was hardly a place to say anything more than “Good term?” – “Yep.” And maybe today isn’t the time either, but Ivy’s been splicing mitrola with sweatleaf to get a better misting agent, and she _really_ wants to show them. She pulls a dress over her head, puts her hair in a high ponytail, and goes to linger in the kitchen with her parents.

And a few hours later, the Slytherin estate is bursting with their family. Ivy and Aura are playing cards with Teddy and Julian and Lucy; Q and Phaedra are home from uni, and Q is telling Victoire about her charms courses and Phae is telling Remus about potions. Cori is off with Finn and Grainne, and they had taken Harry’s dog and Cori’s cat with them.

Fred settles in on the sofa behind Julian. “What a lousy hand,” he says loudly. “Don’t keep those cards. No wonder you’re in last.”

“I’m not in last.”

“You’re going to be, in a minute.”

Julian rolls his eyes at his father, but everyone else is laughing. He throws down a hand of three glittering swords, each of which rises on tiny non-feet to run through a lower-rank card in each of their hands. “Laugh at that.”

Ivy watches her two of trees card get slaughtered. And while everyone is still laughing at the hand, she looks up to Fred, who raises his eyebrows in return. He wants to talk too.

So Ivy wanders off with the pretext of getting another drink, and then Fred ends up in the kitchen nook with her, grabbing a beer from the ice bucket. “Let’s find George,” he says. “What do you think, the library?”

“No, come upstairs. I brought something home.”

So they end up in her bedroom, Ivy spreading out all her tricks on her bed. “I can’t make the mist invisible yet,” she says, squirting it out of a bottle, “but if they’re not paying attention, it sort of works. I want to put it in one of those water-spraying wands, so I can shoot potions instead….”

“Brilliant,” George says, completely sincere. “Yeah, we could do that. It would take awhile. What’s your wand look like? We’ll make you a copy.”

So Ivy digs out her useless wand, and George is taking a photo with his phone. “Good wand, though,” he says, casting a flurry of sparkles with it. “Adventurous.”

“I guess.” She accepts it back, tucking it into her nightstand.

“Come on. I’ve got to tell your dads how smart you are.”

And Ivy laughs, but she’s quite pleased as she follows them downstairs.

 

Then this Christmas is like the others, good and warm and simple. Ivy gets a new jumper from Gram (with an I, properly, because she’d convinced her that nobody calls her _Livia_ unless she’s in a lot of trouble), and Ginny and Tonks had given her a party game, a sort of hot potato, that they’d have to pass a chalice among themselves before a potion explodes. ( _Over 12 unique potions effects!_ reads the box. “It evaporates,” Ginny had promised Harry. “No stains.”)

So that’s where they are later, all the kids sitting on the floor of the library, raucously shoving the bubbling chalice off on each other. And it’s chaos anyway, but at some point Ivy notices that Teddy’s been gone for a long time. “Here,” she says, sliding her tokens to Cori beside her, and everyone is too immersed in the game to question it.

Sometimes Teddy just wants time alone. These parties can be overwhelming, and Teddy’s still sometimes shy. So Ivy expects he’s gone to stay in one of the bedrooms for awhile. She checks her own first.

And which she does, pushing open her door, there’s a shout inside and then it’s slammed shut by a spell in her face. “Hey!” She pounds the door with her fist, grabbing the knob before it can be locked too. “That’s _my_ room – “

And it’s Teddy inside, trying to hold the door closed until he hears it’s Ivy. Reluctantly he lets her in, closing the door behind them. “I thought it was someone else,” he says.

“… Who?”

“Anyone. I didn’t want anyone else to see… this.”

And when she looks past him, her stomach drops. She hadn’t properly put away her chest of props earlier, it’s all scattered across her bed and floor, and it’s clear Teddy has been looking through it. “I should have put all this away, sorry – “

“No. Ivy. Are you… have you got magic?”

Teddy is bigger than she is, and he’s standing before the door, and she feels so trapped. “Of course I’ve got magic. I wouldn’t be at Hogwarts otherwise.” She doesn’t know if she sounds convincing, but there’s nothing else she can say.

“No. Those quills… there’s potions in them. Like in Transfiguration that one time. And levitation powder, and summoning chalk. And….”

She still feels like she can’t breathe. “Okay,” she says. “Lock the door. I’ll show you.”

She ends up telling Teddy everything. He had grown up with Quoties, before Tonks and Ginny had adopted him a few years earlier, so he’d never even heard the word squib before. He hadn’t known it was a thing. “But your parents….”

Ivy shrugs. Whether he means her birth mother or adoptive fathers, they’ve all got magic and she just doesn’t. “Nobody knows why squibs exist.” And Harry had once told her it was a politically charged question, because some oldmage supremacists would say it comes from intermarrying with Quotidians or mixmages. “It doesn’t really matter why. There’s no… cure or anything.”

By now they’re sitting on the floor, and Teddy is playing with a knut dipped in the levitation powder. “But this is brilliant.”

“Yeah. Fred and George have helped. – Oh, they know. They knew first, I was buying too many of their charms.”

“But – none of the teachers? McGonagall?”

She shakes her head. Harry and Voldemort have said they’d handle McGonagall or any other adults themselves, if they find out, but Ivy still lives in dread of what the Headmistress would say then. “Abba,” she says. “He got a letter for me. It’s _his_ castle, anyway.” And hers, technically, though she rarely feels like it.

Teddy is stacking the tiny jars back into her chest. “I’m gonna help,” he says. “The classes we’ve got together, at least. I’m good at secrets.”

“Are you sure? You could get in trouble.”

He laughs. “So could you.”

Yeah, but Hufflepuffs actually care about getting in trouble. She smiles at him instead. “Thanks.”

“Sure, yeah.” A pause. “How _did_ you do Expelliarmus in Defense? Ruby said you were really good at it.”

“I put summoning chalk on the end of her wand when she wasn’t looking. Look, I’ve got almost the entire curriculum planned….”

 

They stay in her room until there’s a knock on the bedroom door. “Ivy?” Phaedra calls through it. “Come down for pudding.”

“In a minute!” She pushes her chest beneath her bed, locking it with Parseltongue. Teddy follows her out.

Everyone is sprawled throughout the sitting room and dining room and tearoom, coffee and rum and puddings before them. Harry and Voldemort are alone on a loveseat, a bit apart from the crowd, drinking coffee. They’re always worn down by the end of these parties.

Still, when Ivy approaches, Harry scoops her into a hug. “Hey, bugbear. Have you had fun?”

She says it in Parseltongue instead of English. “I told Teddy.”

“Good,” Harry says immediately. “Did it go alright? Do we need to….” He trails off, unsure what they can offer her.

“It was fine. Tell you later.” She wiggles out of his hug.

“Okay, love you – bye,” he says in amused exasperation as Ivy runs off to go eat pie.

It _had_ been fine. Teddy is good and selfless. She knows her chances of getting caught increase exponentially with every new person who knows, but… last term had been so lonely. Not even academically difficult, just lonely.

She thinks they’ll have to tell Ruby, because Ruby can’t be excluded from this.

Anyway, she eats pie and cheers on Grainne as she mock-duels Cori with a set of play swords she got for Christmas.

Eventually, when everyone is tired and full, they pack up to go. And when Harry hugs Teddy goodbye, he mumbles something into Teddy’s deep purple hair.

 

When Ivy next takes Teddy with her to WWW, it’s a revelation for him. In an undertone Ivy is telling him what she’s already got, the charmed magnets and trick wands and disappearing twine. And when George ushers her into the backroom with a prototype of the potion-spraying wand, Ivy has to grab the elbow of Teddy’s coat. “He can see, too.”

“Yeah? Cool.” George shuts the door behind them both.

The wand needs an invisible spot from which to spray potions, and some sort of button in the handle, and a cartridge for the potions, and an agent that get the potions to the right viscosity so it doesn’t gum up the barrel. “We asked Ron about it, he made squirtguns for the Aurors before. _Tactical_ squirtguns,” Fred stresses at their looks. “But this has got to be more subtle than that. With clear potions, to start.”

Ivy is holding the prototype like a real wand, as though she’s a real witch. “What’s in it now?”

“Try it and see.”

So she aims it at Teddy, squeezes the button beneath her palm – And a stream of blue potion spurts out. Where it lands on his hands, he immediately gets a dense cluster of freckles.

“It’s a good look for you,” Fred says to Teddy, spelling off the potion. ‘Try out freckles sometime.”

Teddy shrugs, manifesting a matching spray of freckles across his nose. But he’s still fascinated by the wand. “If you bring that to class….”

“It’d be fine to charm objects,” Ivy says. “Not people.”

“Not yet,” George says. “Let us work on it. Hey, would anyone think it were weird if we mailed you a package at Hogwarts?”

“Ah – no, but don’t put it in Wheezes packaging, then it gets confiscated.”

“Story of our life,” George sighs. “Yeah, alright. Give us a few months.”

“You’ve done so much already,” she says, feeling self-conscious as she hands back the prototype.

“We literally owe this store to Harry,” George says.

“Also we’re always in need of some new challenges,” Fred adds. “Don’t worry about it. Keeps us out of trouble.”

“So to speak.”

\---

By the time they’re returning to Hogwarts for their second term, Ivy has resolved to tell Ruby. The trio is sacred to her; it’s important to keep them together.

But Ivy had also found out what had happened to Slytherin, in Pansy’s time. Harry and Voldemort had brought her into the study, one afternoon after the new year. Both of them had been desperately opposed, Voldemort says, when the Ministry had decided to phase out student sortings into Slytherin. Since so many, so _very many_ , of the Death Eaters had been Slytherins, they’d put a five year moratorium on the house itself, and Pansy in her eighth year had been part of the remnants. And then the Slytherins had – left. Their parents were being arrested, and the castle itself seemed to be collapsing, the dungeons wanted to kill them, and they had run away. “It was an awful year,” Harry had said, twisting a quill between his palms. “So… yeah, Pansy and the others fought hard for Slytherin, and to get it reinstated as a house. Thank god. So Ruby is a great Hufflepuff but – I see why her mum wanted her in Slytherin.”

Ivy couldn’t floo Ruby over the entire holiday. Their floo in England was closed; she assumes the family is at their Swiss manor instead. So she doesn’t see Ruby again until they’re aboard the train.

“It was awful,” Ruby says, closing the cabin door behind her dramatically to punctuate her statement when Ivy and Teddy are inside with her. “Mum and Dad say they won’t talk to each other, but then they’re always screaming about how this or that will look _in the settlement_.” She pronounces the phrase caustically. “At least Dad felt bad enough to get me….” She pulls down the neckline of her robes to show them a pearl necklace.

They make appropriate noises, but then Ivy has the sense Teddy is waiting for her to tell Ruby too. “Look. Ruby, sit down.” Ivy puts her useless wand through the door handle of the cabin, just as the train is lurching out of the station.

Ruby frowns at the wand. “There’s spells to keep the door locked.”

Ivy’s laugh is a little strangled. “Yeah. That’s the problem.”

And then she shows Ruby everything she showed Teddy. Teddy helps, really, prompting her with potions and props she forgot. Only it’s different, because Ruby _did_ grow up with magic, and she _does_ know how weird and rare and broken squibs are. So Ruby listens, her eyes growing wider and wider.

And when Ivy pauses in conclusion, Ruby says, “Well, you wouldn’t be here if Voldemort weren’t your dad.”

At some level, it’s true. Nobody but Voldemort could have altered the book of names. The Ministry’s copy of class syllabi had made her preparation the summer before so much easier. And Voldemort… he didn’t want any of his children to be prodigies, but he did also expect them to be treated as exceptional. He and Harry fought about it all the time. Still, Ivy is raw and vulnerable, and it’s the wrong thing to hear. “I’ve worked so much harder than you have to be here,” she hisses. “What have _you_ done, except be born with the right magic to the right family?”

Ruby narrows her eyes. “You’re just cheating your way through classes we’re all working hard at! Your potions, your _tricks_. Maybe you should go perform for the Quotie circus instead.”

“I thought we were friends!”

“You dad ruined everything!”

“ _Fuck_ you.”

Ruby inhales sharply. It’s not the first time Ivy has said fuck (Harry forgets himself around his kids a lot anyway, and he says they don’t care), but it’s certainly the first time she’s said it _at_ somebody, and it feels like a bridge that can’t be uncrossed. So Ivy is grabbing Cinna’s chest and her own bookbag – she can’t hoist her entire trunk off the overhead, but she can storm off with some minimal accompaniment. “Stay,” she snaps at Teddy, who is caught terribly between them. “Just… stay.”

So she wrenches her wand from the door handle, carrying Cinna and her bookbag from the cabin. Then – well, there’s nowhere to _go_ except perhaps the toilets, as every cabin is full. So, gritting her teeth, she enters the cabin with her Slytherin dormmates.

Meredith and Miori are looking at a magazine; Saskia is braiding her hair. “Oh,” she says. “The Hufflepuffs don’t want you anymore?”

“Nope.” She decisively puts the terrarium onto the seat beside Saskia; she recoils a bit. “Look. I’ve had Cinna with me since the start of term, and if you report me now, you’re a bitch.”

Meredith and Miori take the news of a snake in their dorm better than Saskia had, and then Ivy is pulling a book from her bag. She had taken it from Voldemort’s own study, not the library where they put more child-friendly books. “Here,” she says, holding out to Saskia.

“Voldemort doesn’t know?”

She loves her father, but she is so tired of hearing about _Voldemort_ already. “No,” she says. “I took it while he was away.”

“Good.” Saskia flips it open to a bone-breaking curse. Great.

So Ivy stays with them for the length of the train ride. This is where she belongs. Regardless of what Ruby is going to do with the newfound knowledge of her squib status – she is a Slytherin, and she belongs here.

 

So Ivy sits with Miori even in double classes with the Hufflepuffs. She eats dinner beside Saskia, even though Saskia can be terrible. She stays up later to talk with her dormmates about dark magic.

At the end of January, they take a vow to never reveal anything named as confidential within the dorms outside of it. It had been Ivy’s suggestion, though she hadn’t known it: she had only mentioned that Voldemort had told her that he had made a vow upon entering his Slytherin dorm. But now Ivy’s name is on a legal document, and she can’t tell anyone that Meredith hates her au pair or that Miori’s mum is embarrassing.

None of them know Ivy is a squib.

And Teddy and Ruby say nothing to her either. Not separately, not in the classes they share. And as Professor Spiraea had mostly accepted Ivy slipping into the Hufflepuff table for meals sometimes, he looks at her differently now that she doesn’t anymore.

And then there’s a morning in Transfiguration, when Ivy just isn’t going to be able to fake her way through the lesson. Today was supposed to be a lecture, so she hadn’t come prepared with any tricks, but then Professor Bulstrode had passed out a stack of leaves with a hole burned through the middle and told them to restore it. And it’s _stupid_ , because Ivy would have just picked up a leaf outside in preparation if she had known, but instead she’s staring down at the green leaf with its perfect singe before her.

And then Ruby re-enters the classroom from going to the loo, passing past Ivy’s desk. And she doesn’t say anything or make eye contact, but in two inconspicuous motions, she drops a whole leaf onto Ivy’s desk and snatches up the singed one. She keeps walking.

Ruby’s desk is behind Ivy’s, so Ivy’s got to twist to look back curiously after she’s pocketed the leaf. Ruby doesn’t smile back at her, but she gives a tiny shrug, pushing her dark hair behind her ears.

They’ve got classes at the opposite ends of the castle the rest of the day, so it’s not until dinner that Ivy can run up to Ruby and Teddy as they enter the Great Hall. “Hi. Um. Sorry.”

“Uh-huh.” Ruby seems unconvinced. “Here, we’re taking food back to Teddy’s room, it’s quieter.”

So when they’re smuggled dumplings and grapes back into the boys’ dorm, they all look to one another for a long moment. Then Teddy, always the peacemaker, says, “Look, we want to help. When we can.”

“You haven’t got to. I’ve planned out most of this year….”

“Ivy, god.” He’s laughing, so she does too.

But Ruby isn’t. She’s picking at a thread on the comforter. “Did you ask your dad what happened to Slytherin – before?”

“Yeah.”

“Because I asked my mum. More than what Professor Bulstrode had told me before. And he just got treated so – specially, while all the Death Eaters,” (she pronounces this as though the words don’t fit in her mouth) “actually got punished worse. My grandparents left Britain for that year. My great-grandfather had his home just _taken_ , in reparations. And it’s all….” She presses her hands to her face as though she can scrub away her feelings. “Really, really unfair.”

She had known about the Death Eaters’ prison sentences, and the students running away, and the treaties that required Voldemort have no contact with any of them again. But the Death Eaters are out and Azkaban is nearly empty now. She hadn’t asked how Pansy specifically had been affected, but she should have. “Sorry,” she says. “But… that wasn’t me. And it’s so long ago.”

“Yeah,” Ruby says in a sigh. “It’s fine. Not your fault.”

“If your mum wants to talk to him, she could.”

“She doesn’t. Just….” Ruby waves a hand, her purple nail polish catching the light of the sconces. “Nevermind. It’s fine. We want to help.”

And so there’s nothing more Ivy can say at this time. It hadn’t been _her_ war. But Harry and Voldemort had warned her there would be weird, hard parts of growing up as their children specifically. And really, she’s lucky to have not experienced it before now.

 

She starts eating dinner with the Hufflepuffs again. Teddy and Ruby sit on either side of her in their joint classes, passing her props under the desk. And when Fred and George mail her a copy of her wand that can spray potions from its tip, Teddy and Ruby are there to watch her test it.

So that’s how she finishes out her first year. She gets top marks in all the academic courses and okay ones in the practical courses. The Transfiguration final is to turn a teapot into a tortoise, and Ivy goes to Professor Bulstrode to say she has an ethical objection to using animals in magic. And Professor Bulstrode sighs and says Q had come to her with the same objection, and the tortoise is worth forty percent of the exam grade, so do with that what you will, Gaunt. Ivy charms the teapot to crawl across the desk instead (with a short-lived animation tincture that Fred and George had sent her a prototype of), and she passes, at least.

The night before they leave, Saskia hands Ivy back her dark magic book. “Bring me another one next time. About dueling.”

They’ve got another six years together, so Ivy just rolls her eyes. “Okay.”

“And Father says you should come over during the summer. My birthday is in August.”

Ivy knows she’s been left out of some oldmage socializing, whether because of Harry and Voldemort or something else. “Yeah, sure. Owl me?”

“Yes.”

So Ivy closes and secures Cinna’s terrarium with Parseltongue, and then her chest of magic props with _more_ Parseltongue. It is useful.

And when the six of them – Ivy, Ruby, Teddy, Cori, Grainne, Finn – pile into a train cabin, Ivy can take Cinna out, winding her around her shoulders. “Ugh, you’re getting big,” she complains in Parseltongue. “Too many rats.”

“ _Yes_ ,” Cinnabar says in a profoundly pleased way.

And when they get off the train, Harry is waiting for them alone. “Abba meant to come,” he says apologetically. “But there was some sort of emergency. Azkaban, he said.”

Ruby, who’s coming home with them to take their floo, frowns beside Ivy. “But there’s hardly anyone in Azkaban anymore.”

“Yeah,” Harry says, looking at her curiously, because it’s not the sort of thing a twelve year old should know. “That seems to be the problem. The Dementors are hungry.”

\---

Voldemort doesn’t arrive home from Azkaban until quite late that night. He’d had to tell Penelope to text Harry, to eat without him, to get their daughters to bed.

The problem is the Dementors. Voldemort finds, in querying the Azkaban guards, that none of them know exactly how many Dementors the prison even has. Dementors are indistinguishable from one another, and they can breed into existence rapidly, and by all accounts they may also disappear spontaneously as well. The problem is compounded by the guards themselves – quite a few of them are squibs, and some have enough magic to see the Dementors but others do not. But finally, one of them had reported to the DMLE that there seem to be fewer Dementors in prison than there had once been. And nobody knows where they have gone.

There are fewer prisoners, accordingly. Everyone arrested for being a Death Eater was now out – some on a modified house arrest, others simply free. Crimes against Quotidians were still a problem, because their populations had more contact than they’d ever had before, but more of it ran to fraud and theft than torture. Everyone is quite clear that Voldemort would be harsh on any hate crimes against Quotidians. It keeps the world at ease with him.

So finally, just before midnight, he settles at the kitchen table with a pot of tea, recounting this day to Harry. And Harry says he hasn’t thought to eat all day, and Voldemort admits it, so they’re dividing up a cheese board when there’s a noise on the stairs.

“Ivy.” Voldemort knows her gait, even if the childminding spells weren’t tugging at her. “Come here.”

She creeps in, wide awake in the oversized shirt that she’ll wear as a nightgown. “Hi, Abba.” She tips herself into his arms for a hug, because they’re all soft and cuddly this time of night. They take after Harry in this way.

“I hope you didn’t stay up on my behalf.”

“No. I just couldn’t sleep.” She takes the chair across from them. “What happened in Azkaban?”

Voldemort raises his non-eyebrows at Harry; Harry shrugs minutely. “Nothing that the DMLE can’t fix. Potentially with the assistance of the Magical Beasts Department.” The tea is decaffeinated; he conjures her a mug. “How was your term?”

“Good. Mostly good. I….” And then she hesitates.

So Voldemort casts a silencing charm around the kitchen, because Aura and Cori are asleep upstairs. And when the spell is in place, Ivy reaches into her hair, where her wand had been holding her ponytail in place. “Look.”

Oh. Not her wand, he can feel it as soon as he picks it up. But a copy, a polished larch exterior with a feather motif in the handle. When he depresses a button beneath his palm, a shrinking solution sprays out the tip, shrinking the empty saucer before him.

“Fred and George made it,” Ivy says happily. “I had to fix the misting agents a few times, otherwise the potion kept clogging the tip. I’ve got to flush it between potions of course, but it’s how I passed the Charms final.” She’s putting fig and brie on a cracker as she talks, becoming animated. “And I got better at getting the potions out of hollow quills, and I found a flower whose saliva will make everything jelly. And I just brought acetone on the day we were supposed to make paint disappear in Charms.”

“And Teddy?” Harry asks.

“Teddy helped, a lot. So did Ruby,” she offers, a little hesitantly. She hadn’t been able to write everything home, so this is news to them.

“Good,” Harry says. “They’re really good for you.”

“I know.” Sitting up: “What’s in the Aurors’ office?”

“… You know, I haven’t looked. I’m going in for a half-day on Saturday, nobody else will be there. Want to come?”

“Yeah.” She beams at him around a mouthful of brie.

Finally they send her to bed. (“Please brush your teeth again,” Voldemort tells her. – “Do the mouth cleaning charm instead.” – “… Come here.”)

And as she’s going, Harry just _beams_ after her. When he notices Voldemort watching him, he grins. “What? I’m proud of this one.”

“As am I.”

\---

There are a number of possible approaches for gathering and accounting for the Dementors. The most promising options are all the purview of the Unspeakables. The most promising of _those_ are the purview of Severus Snape.

Snape works on death within the Department of Mysteries. Not that Voldemort cares a great deal about his happiness, but he seems happier no longer working with children, at least. It seems best for everyone.

So when Voldemort enters Snape’s office, Snape barely looks up from the research paper before him to spell his books off the chair opposite. “Minister,” he says, in the exact tone he had once said _My Lord_ , and they both know it.

Voldemort sits, glancing at the research paper, but it doesn’t interest him. “We need new magic to keep the Dementors under control.”

“What sort of control?”

“The sort in which they’re not escaping Azkaban. Their needs are no longer satisfied there.”

A smile twists Snape’s lips. “Offer to house other countries’ criminals.”

Unfortunately, no. Dementors are a uniquely British problem; all their nearest allies expelled their own populations decades ago. The public opinion has turned against them in recent years, and Voldemort expects the international council will declare them cruel and unusual punishment within the decade. But the magical population understands so little of Dementors – “I need you to kill them,” he says, blunt because Severus will know how to finesse it later. “They are becoming a menace.”

Azkaban has remained open as a sanctuary for Dementors as much as anything, in these recent years. A particular soft-hearted faction wants it closed altogether, that a different sort of legal system of incarceration should take its place. Granger had wanted to do it herself, but they had both known that she didn’t have the gravitas to get the Wizengamot behind her yet. Voldemort had sent her to go work on education reform instead, and he’s grateful for it now, that nobody is asking questions of whether Dementors have feelings. Because frankly he doesn’t care if they do or not. He just needs them killed.

So he and Severus discuss their options. All are rather dark – Dementors, like roaches, have evolved to live off adverse conditions. So when Severus asks whether he might study the Veil as a means of getting rid of them, Voldemort says fine.

This would cause… hardship later.

\---

The twins arrive home from university, vibrant and thoughtful and far too cool for Ivy. They’ve both cut their hair very short, and Phaedra put in a purple streak. Q wears James’s robes now – not that robes are _very_ gendered compared to Quotie fashion, but they look good on her. They talk about their friends from abroad, the plays they’ve gone to, the flourishing university town growing around the mage university in Cardiff.

The five of them are allowed to go away for a long weekend, to a wixie town in Spain they’ve gone on holiday to before. Voldemort double-checks that their portkeys still work in case of emergency, and he renews all the protective spells he’ll put on them (all her sisters protest this, so Ivy does too, but really it’s a relief), and then they get a suite in a holiday home set just back from the beach.

So it’s a blinding morning when they’re all putting on swim costumes and packing bags of books and sandwiches, that Ivy wanders into Phaedra’s room. “Hey,” Phae says, tossing a magazine on the bed between them. “Want it?”

Ivy picks it up, rolls and unrolls it in her hands. “What was Hogwarts like for you?”

Q and Phaedra are twenty now. They’d been the first at everything – born before Voldemort had become Minister, dressed up and brought out for his campaigns, the ones all the tabloids would write about when judging Harry and Voldemort’s (mostly Voldemort’s, let’s be honest) parenting capacities. They seem the most likely to get into politics themselves. So… Ivy just assumes they will know what she’s really asking.

“Hogwarts was good,” Phae says, shaking out a sunhat. “Professors liked me. Flitwick _loved_ me. I had enough friends. Why, what’s it like for you?”

“Uh, good. What did they say about Abba?”

“… You know, not much. Scorpius had a worse time than we did, I think. Actually being in Slytherin.”

Scorpius Malfoy had been in Q and Phaedra’s year. And because Harry worked with Draco, Scorpius would sometimes be at their parties. A Slytherin, but incredibly harmless. But the Malfoys had been Death Eaters for decades, so – Ivy understands that it’s hard to break out of history.

Phaedra, seeing that Ivy is still conflicted, smiles through her purple lipstick. “Just tell them to piss off.”

“I don’t _want_ to tell her to piss off.” Ruby. She doesn’t care about the Slytherins, but she does care about Ruby.

“Ah. That’s harder, then.” Phaedra slings a bag over her shoulder. “Sorry, bugbear. Ask Abba for a portkey to Cardiff when it all gets to be too much. We’ll take you out to lunch.”

Ivy offers her a smile. “Yeah, alright.” She crams the magazine into Phaedra’s bag and then runs to put on her sandals.

 

Teddy spends that summer with them, enough that Harry jokes he sees more of Ginny than Voldemort, as often as she’s dropping him off. And then he and Ginny will go argue about Quidditch, and Ivy and Teddy will shut themselves in her room. And Teddy starts bringing her things. Compressed sponges, for when they need to vanish liquids; dry ice for when they need to freeze them. They spend a lot of time watching chemistry videos, and more time in Fred and George’s backroom. One weekend Voldemort takes them into the Quotidian part of London to pick up tiny tubs of sulfur and zinc and potassium compounds. “Ah, potions?” the rather intimidated shopkeeper asks, because they’re all in robes and – well, Voldemort looks like Voldemort.

“Yes.”  


“Great,” he mumbles, and drops an envelope of thermite into their bag.

 

And then there’s times when Ivy can just be a twelve year old on summer break. She goes swimming at Ruby’s, and Pansy is so nice to her that she can’t imagine she actually hates Voldemort. She gets good at flying, and Harry will stay out with her until sundown, practicing reversing and sprinting. She writes poetry.

And then it’s back to school – Aura in her sixth year, Cori in third, Ivy in second. Voldemort drops them off at King’s Cross (“We could go by ourselves,” Aura protests. – “You could, but I would not want you to,” Voldemort says as he’s levitating her trunk into the Ministry car.) And once more, Ivy hugs Voldemort for a very long time before climbing into the train.

 


	3. Year 2, Part 1

“Gaunt! Cast any good curses this summer?”

Ivy turns to find Porter, the worst Gryffindor. He’s grown at least six inches since June. “Yeah,” she says. “Really awful ones. Can I pull your brains out through your nose?” She’s reaching for her wand as she says it.

“But I’m a pureblood.”

This gives her pause – it’s an old word, thought of as supremacist language now because nothing about _blood_ is ever a good thing. “I don’t care what you are,” she says. “Don’t ask about curses if you don’t want to be cursed.”

“Dark Lord Gaunt-Potter,” Drew, behind him, breathes to Porter.

“Dark Lady?”

“No, I think it’s Dark Lord for both.”

“How about Warlock….”

They squirrel away into their own train cabin. Ivy takes hers, picking Cinna out of her terrarium to watch out the window.

They’re halfway to Hogwarts when the train slows to a crawl, then stops completely. A buzz of student interest ripples down the train’s corridor. “Are we broken down?” – “Are we picking people up?”

Julian, who’s a Prefect, slows before their cabin. “Have you seen Aura?” he asks Ivy and Cori.

“She’s too good for us,” Cori tells him. “Why are we stopped?”

“There was a sighting of a Dementor over the train. Have you seen anything? Felt anything?”

They all shake their heads. Julian says Aura is the best in their year at a Patronus, so it’s probably fine, the Dementor’s probably gone, but just in case, would they send her to the front of the train if they see her?

And when he’s gone, Teddy looks around, at their equally grim expressions. “What’s a Dementor?”

They get Teddy sorted, as Grainne pulls out her Care of Magical Creatures textbook out, flipping it to an illustration of a Dementor’s Kiss. “It used to be used more,” she says. “For war criminals. But not so many, now.”

“They’re probably bored,” Finn says, as they all stare down at the Dementor’s illustration drifting across the page.

\---

They don’t hear about the Dementors again. Instead they trek into the Great Hall for the sorting and the feast. Professor McGonagall looks as she always does, in her crisp blue tartan robe, tall behind the lectern. She announces that Hagrid will be serving as head of Gryffindor now (Ivy claps, though the rest of the Slytherins look indifferent) and that Professor Tarquinius Rowan will be teaching DADA this year.

Rowan. She looks at him curiously, because Rowan was a surname in the Slytherin family tree; she knows it from summoning the ancestor for Samhain. But Rowan has long, deep red hair and different angles to his face than she’d known Voldemort to have when he had been young. If they are related, it’s only quite distantly. From the Ravenclaw table, Cori catches her eye and shrugs, apparently with the same thought. And then McGonagall steps away from the lectern and the feast materializes before them.

And if Rowan thinks anything of having a Gaunt in his class, he does not demonstrate it the following day. He hands Ivy a syllabus when she walks in the door, nods minimally when she says during roll call that she’d prefer to be called Ivy over Livia, and otherwise doesn’t interact with her. He says he’s been living in Albania for the past twenty years, but he’s quite fond of Hogwarts and he’s pleased to return. And then he begins a lecture about the differences among curses, hexes, and jinxes. Ivy settles into her seat, picking at the end of her quill.

 

Classes get harder. In Transfiguration, Ivy needs to light a smoke bomb a few times, to distract from her failure to turn a down pillow into a duck. (Really, animal transfiguration is the _worst_.) The scorching spell in charms, instead of branding a wooden block with a letter where Ivy has surreptitiously rubbed a manticore tongue, ignites the entire thing. “A bit overenthusiastic today, Gaunt,” Flitwick chirps as he puts the mess out.

Ruby and Teddy get better at slipping Ivy transfigured objects, before doing it for themselves a second time. She really, really doesn’t deserve the reputation she’s gaining as being the best in their class, but she’ll make the most of it.

One evening, early in October, Saskia comes to find her Ivy reading in their dorm. “We’re going to duel.” She hefts _Dueling and Defensive Magic_ onto Ivy’s bedsheet, hard enough to bounce.

So Ivy pulls the ribbon bookmark into _The Count of Monte Cristo_ before reaching for Saskia’s tome. “I don’t want to duel you.”

Saskia scowls. “You’ve got to know some of it already. Grandfather showed me Bombarda this summer, he said – Voldemort used it a lot.”

Ivy’s got no idea what Voldemort used, apart from the Unforgivables. Still, she feigns an innocent shrug. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

For anyone else, this would be enough. Porter and Drew buzz around her like gnats until she threatens to curse them or, rarely, even draws her wand. Sometimes her peers say things like “Don’t argue with the heir of Slytherin” in a light-hearted way, and sometimes… less light-hearted. But Saskia sets her jaw. “I don’t care.”

Ivy has probably got more dueling tricks than anything – Fred and George tend toward chaos and violence naturally, and they’ve told her that the best defense is a good offense, that she can just attack people if they get too suspicious. (“No,” Harry says in horror, because he’d been with her that time, and George had just clapped Harry on the back. “It’s for her safety, mate.”) But all the magic she’s used on other people before had been harmless – in Charms, hair lightening spells, freckles charms, that sort of thing. Nothing antagonistic.

She’s still flipping through the book, making mental notes of the spells she can and can’t approximate already. “Maybe if you find something really good,” she deflects. “And I’m interested enough.”

Saskia snatches her book back. “Coward.”

That shouldn’t sting, but it does. “I can’t hurt you. Or anyone.”

“Uh-huh.” Saskia storms out, probably to find Meredith.

This is confirmed a few minutes later, when Miori lets herself in. “What did you say to Saskia?”

“That I didn’t want to duel her.”

“God, is she still on about that?” Miori shakes out an enchanted facecloth to take off her mascara. “I watched some sixth years dueling at the lake last weekend. It’s funny how, ah, non-physical it all looks? I think if you just rush them with a headlock, you’re going to win.”

“Papa – Harry always complains that wixies have more spells than common sense.” Though he says it makes his job easier, tackling people while they’re still drawing their wands.

“Yeah, it’s like they’ve forgotten they’ve got a body too, not just a wand. I took mixed martial arts for years, and I told Saskia if she got close enough for me to pin her, I was gonna do it. Then she stopped asking.”

Ivy laughs and Miori looks pleased with herself. Then Ivy asks, “What was MMA like?”

“Good, it was fun. I was small and my parents worried,” she shrugs. Then a little more hesitantly, “And my parents aren’t magic. They wanted me to have a normal life, normal ways of defending myself even if I was learning magic too. And, y’know, it’s something they understood even if they didn’t know what was happening in mage primary, really.”

Ivy tries not to look too surprised. Voldemort had said that some newmage students – or Muggleborn, what they had once been called – got sorted into Slytherin, but they’d never admit it. Slytherin was still the house of old families and old magic. “Nice,” she says. “Teddy grew up with Quoties too. I mean – he didn’t find out until he was eight, they’d kept it from him, and a lot is still new to him. It’s a lot for them. And you.”

Miori sits back against her pillow, clearly glad this revelation hadn’t gone badly. “Yeah,” she says. “There’s already a lot they don’t understand. Why I care about some things. And I can’t explain why everyone likes Quidditch,” she says with a laugh. “But it’s normal to grow up without them being involved with everything, right?”

“Right.”

 

When Ivy writes to them that Saskia Rowle wants to duel her, Voldemort writes back that she should not put herself in any unnecessary danger, and not merely for the obvious reasons. _The castle’s magic is your magic,_ he writes to her. _Any significant harm that comes to you may disrupt its structural integrity. The windows shattered on the night I died. Do not jeopardize the castle._

So, that is alarming. She reads the letter at lunch, holding the parchment under the table so nobody else may see it. There’s a written form of Parseltongue, she knows, but she hasn’t learned it yet, so for now they just need to be discreet.

She could destroy the castle if she’s hurt badly. Voldemort had once – or more than once, almost certainly – damaged the castle by getting injured in the war. _The night I died_. That phrase makes her chest go funny.

She won’t be dueling Saskia, not until they learn it in DADA and maybe not even then. She’s quite good at misdirection, anyway.

\---

Severus comes to Voldemort’s office on Halloween morning.

He hasn’t got an appointment, but the look on his face is grim enough that Voldemort tells Penelope to move his meeting with the St. Mungo’s board instead. He lets Severus in, and the silencing wards fall closed behind them.

Severus tells him that the Veil is functional, and if he would sign off on putting a Dementor through it, the Prime Enigma of the Department of Mysteries will authorize it as well. And Voldemort hasn’t got protocol for essentially executing a Dementor, so he pulls out a typical conviction form and writes _1 Dementor_ at the top. Severus nearly smiles when he reads it.

And then, he hesitates. “There is one… significant development,” he says. Voldemort gestures him onward, but he doesn’t elaborate. “Auror Potter should probably be brought in as well.”

 

It’s lucky that Harry is in the office and not in fieldwork when Voldemort enters the Aurors’ department. He and Rye had been sorting through cold cases for their new detective, so he’s got an entire table of crime scene photos before him when Voldemort lets himself in. “Hi,” Harry says, casting a masking charm over the photos. “You don’t want to see those, they’re gruesome. …What?”

Their Legilimency is rigid, uncomfortable between them. “Apologies,” Voldemort says to Rye, and then gestures Harry out.

He barely grabs his bag before walking out of the office, not even stopping for their admin assistant. “Vol – “ He drops into Parseltongue immediately, as he does when they have stressful conversations. “What? Are the girls okay?”

“Yes.” Voldemort is leading him to the bank of lifts.

“Q? Phae?”

“Yes.”

“Hogwarts?” That is about the limit of what Voldemort cares about, apart from Harry himself. He’s a little annoyed and a little desperate when he says, “Please tell me.”

And Voldemort loops an arm around his back. “I’m sorry,” he says at last. “This is not mine to tell.”

They descend to the Department of Mysteries. “A prophecy?” Harry says doubtfully, because their own prophecy still _exists_ , it is still a force on their life.

“No. We are seeing Severus.”

Snape…. It’s been so many years since he asked what Snape’s research is currently, in those brief and politic exchanges at Christmas, that he no longer knows. “… Death?”

“ _Harry_.” Because Voldemort is exasperated too.

They enter a winding department – obsidian for some walls, metal for others. Snape has his own office deep within the department, and Voldemort’s still got a hand on Harry’s back as they enter. Harry gives him a quizzical look and steps away. “Snape. Hi.”

“Sit down.”

They do. Voldemort clearly already knows what this is about, and it’s just so infuriating. Harry waits for Snape to explain.

“For the past half year I have been studying the Veil at the center of the Department of Mysteries,” Snape says. “I intended for it to exterminate Dementors. But this morning – while the barrier between worlds is meager – we made a discovery. And – Black is alive. And recovered.”

Harry’s mouth doesn’t work for what feels like quite a long time. “Oh,” he says at last, a bit high-pitched, and then he’s standing without recognizing he’s done so. “I need to see him.”

Snape acquiesces, surprisingly. Harry had been expecting to hear no, so he still follows as though in a dream. Partway there, he thinks to ask, “Is he awake?”

“Not yet.”

“ _Will_ he wake up?”

“He might.”

“Okay. Stop. Stop.” He grabs Voldemort’s hand – not that it makes a difference, he’d been half-leaning on Voldemort anyway, but Snape needs to slow to a halt in the corridor. “He doesn’t want to see either of you. To be frank.”

“This is _my_ research,” Snape says in a brittle tone.

So Harry turns to Voldemort. “You can’t…. I’m sure I’ll tell you what happens. But not when he wakes up. Please.”

“Of course.” Voldemort waits for Harry to step back, their magic breaking apart.

“Thank you. Love you.” Harry follows Snape; Voldemort goes.

His heart is in his throat when Snape enters his wand into the secured room’s door. And then there’s blue light everywhere, and it fades to white near the center of the room. And then, held under stasis spells, is Sirius’s body.

There are tears on Harry’s cheeks; Snape ignores them. “The Veil seems prone to ejecting its previous – victims in reverse order. As records state that it was once used – if irregularly – for capital punishment, we are not enthusiastic about delving any deeper into its realm. We hope that Black can tell us more about what lies beyond. We have checked his base physiological responses, but not any higher level functions. He may well be braindead. More likely, his personality will have drastically changed.”

“Okay. That’s fine.”

“If he is… lucid, I am bringing Remus in later.”

“Good.”

By now Harry has crossed the room, hovering at the clinical bed upon which Sirius – his body – whatever – is stretched out. His chest rises and falls in time with an oxygen charm hovering over his face. Harry wants to touch him.

Another researcher comes in. “Mr. Potter,” she says briskly. “Shall I cast the resuscitation spell?”

“Please.”

She steps in, swirling a red-orange spell over him. Its tendrils enter Sirius’s mouth, his nose – and then there’s an awful moment when nothing happens –

And then _everything_ happens. Sirius jolting as though out of a deep sleep, and his hands clench the air before him, and he’s not strong enough to sit up. His head lolls to the side and then he’s looking at Harry, they’re looking at each other for the first time in thirty-three years, and then Harry is pushing past the researcher to throw his arms around him.

“Wait, be careful – “

“Piss off,” Sirius tells her in a gravelly, unused voice. The hand he puts to Harry’s shoulders is shaky and incredibly cold, but he’s alive, he’s alive.

“I love you, I’m sorry I never said it, you died in such a stupid way – “ Harry is babbling, even as a stool is conjured and the researcher is pressing him onto it.

And Snape makes a noise from his corner of the room. “Perhaps we should impose some order on recounting these past decades.”

Sirius looks over Harry’s shoulder. “Harry. Who the fuck let Snivellus in.”

“Wait – don’t fight – he’s here because it’s his research. You can’t kick him out. Just – “ Harry is disentangling himself, gently pushing Sirius to lie back, because it’s clear he is hurting himself by straining to sit up.

“Stay still while I take your vitals,” the other researcher says. “And then….” She glances back at Snape.

“Then I have questions.”

“I bet you do,” Sirius says darkly. He lies back with some ill grace.

But it’s clear that Sirius is rather fucked, looking around the sterile room and laughing at odd intervals. “This has got to be real,” he mutters, mostly to himself. “Or else – or else – “ He’s rubbing his hands together as though to warm them. “I had only seen places we’d been to before – and when I saw James, he was always younger – never got old – “

“I am not _old_ ,” Harry says, as though offended, but he’s laughing. And Sirius studies his face for a long time without speaking.

He’s got frostbite on his hands and feet, with darkness marring the tips of his fingers. “Bloody cold all the time,” he mutters. “On that mountain. I never found gloves.”

“What mountain?” Harry asks.

Sirius’s dark gaze goes darker. “That is death. Scaling this mountain – I could almost never see the top. It was going to be forever. Sometimes there were caves, sometimes I passed people, but – I was alone.”

“We need to bring in a proper healer,” the researcher says, even as Snape behind her is taking pages of notes already. “It may be partially healed.”

“Fine.” Sirius squeezes his eyes shut, then they snap open again. “Still see it,” he murmurs, running a hand over his worn face. “God, I’ll never sleep again.” A deep breath; he looks to Harry. “So,” he says, “we won.”

“… Yeah. We won. I can’t – “ Harry hates himself for looking to Snape in this moment. “It’s a lot to tell you at once. But we won. Most everyone lived. We’ve had peace for thirty years now.”

“Harry, my god….” Sirius’s hands clearly hurt when he lifts them; he flinches. “I’ve missed so much. I’m proud of you.”

That feeling in his chest. “I know.”

And then Snape lifts his wand to summon a healer. “This is quite touching,” he says, “but I have further research to conduct.”

“I should stay,” Harry says immediately, because otherwise he thinks they will kill each other.

“You may not. You may return tomorrow.”

Leaving Sirius so soon after getting him back is torture. But Snape follows him out, closing the door firmly. “Tell him nothing,” he says. “The shock will kill him.”

This might be hyperbolic but might not be. “What the fuck am I supposed to say to him, then.”

“As little as possible.”

He hates it but – Snape is right. “Just – fix him first,” he mutters. “And I’ll tell him everything later.”

“I look forward to your attempt at subtlety.”

Wanker. Harry steps away, and Snape re-enters the lab.

 

He’s so messed up that it doesn’t even occur to him to return to work. Instead, up to Voldemort’s office, where he barely knocks before letting himself in. Voldemort is reading a dossier in preparation for afternoon meetings; he gestures Harry in.

“Can I use your floo?” Harry asks, crossing the office already.

“Yes. – Harry,” Voldemort says as he’s reaching for the bowl of floo powder. “How is he?”

“Fine. Awake. Himself. I need to – not be here.” So Voldemort follows him into the floo.

And when they step into their home, Harry is laughing, light-headed, that delayed reaction of shock he would always get after a battle. “I just – god.” He is pacing toward the kitchen, putting on tea to burn off energy. “I shouldn’t have left him alone with Snape.”

“Snape has professional commitments, that extend so far as Sirius.”

The intimacy of Sirius’s name in Voldemort’s mouth is jarring. Had he said _Black_ before? _Your godfather_? Harry can’t recall. “He said – Snape said – that Sirius can’t know anything yet. I told him the war was over, that we had won. Oh – “ He slaps a hand to his forehead. “Dumbledore. He doesn’t even know that Dumbledore is dead. It had been _that_ long ago.” Kettle, teapot. His hands are shaking. He can’t even sit down, so he drinks it as he still paces the kitchen.

Voldemort slips into the stool on the island counter, as though his stillness can balance Harry’s frenetic energy. “I know nothing more than what Severus told me this morning,” he says. “And I assume he will require care and study within he lab for quite a long time. But afterward – would he move into Grimmauld Place?”

“Oh. No, I couldn’t do that to him. And I couldn’t keep him here. I’ll have to buy him a house – give him back the inheritance. I need to talk to Gringotts, they probably closed out his account entirely, but I think Remus did most of that sort of work then. He still hasn’t sat down, but with a twitch of his fingers he has summoned parchment and a biro. **_Gringotts_** , he writes in a scrawl. **_Account + transfer Ǥ. GP deed?_**

Putting the logistics in order at least distracts him from the feelings he can’t process yet. He takes a seat beside Voldemort, pouring another mug of tea. “How do I tell everyone?” he says. “A _resurrection_. God.”

“As Severus’s work is confidential, you may not say anything but what he tells you to say.”

“Brilliant.” He chews on the pen’s cap, then adds to the list, **_Healers, St. Mungo’s, caregiver. Potions._** “And therapy,” he says, as Voldemort reads over his shoulder. “He was really just – _fucked_ even before he died. I can’t imagine this would make him better adjusted.”

“Yes.”

**_Tell: Remus. Andromeda + Ted, Tonks. Order._** “Haven’t had the Order properly together in years.”

“It may be – overstimulating. Initially.”

“Whatever, I can’t do anything Snape says so anyway.” **_To tell Sirius: Dumbledore,_**  and then his hand hovers, unable to write the ridiculously tiny word _war_ to encapsulate it all. “Is there… the thing Quoties do, when people get released from hostage situations after years and they need to be caught up. Have we got someone like that?”

Voldemort is deeply amused. “We havne’t had many hostage situations, except perhaps you.”

“Yeah, well.” **_Unification. Statute lifted. Magitech._**

“He would care that Pettigrew is dead,” Voldemort offers. “And Narcissa, and Bellatrix. Perhaps the others.”

“Right. …Has Pettigrew’s _fucking_ Order of Merlin ever been revoked?”

“No. I’ll petition for it to be. Does Sirius want an Order of Merlin in his stead?”

“From you? No.” Hearing himself, Harry winces. “Sorry. I mean… well, he wouldn’t. Thank you, though.” **_Kids. Mage university. The internet_** , he writes.

And eventually Voldemort needs to depart in time for his next meeting. “I should….” Harry makes a vague gesture toward the floo as well. “Nothing more I can do here. Oh, I’m going straight from work to Godric’s Hollow. I’ll be home before sundown.”

“Good.”

“Yeah.” He tucks his list under the fruit bowl. He’d revisit it tonight.

\---

Cori comes to ask Ivy if they can have the Samhain fire in the Slytherin common room this year. “The new Ravenclaw prefects are really… soft,” she sighs. “I think they’d go to McGonagall.”

Ivy makes a face. “What are they scared of? Someone’s going to come back from the dead?” Pushing away her bowl of soup: “Sure, yeah. I’ll clean out enough space for your entire crystal collection.”

“Cheers,” Cori says, boldly disregarding that Ivy is making fun of her.

So that is how, after the Halloween feast, Ivy is letting all her friends into the Slytherin common room. “Ugh, smells like badgers,” one older Slytherin boy complains as Teddy and Ruby enter.

“Piss off, Gilman,” Ivy says. “Go polish your broom, it’s all you’re good at.”

“Daddy send you any mudblood skulls this year?”

There’s a reaction even from the other Slytherins in the common room. And Ivy knows her trick wand is still loaded with liquid fire potion, so she jams it under Gilman’s chin, squeezing hard on the button. “Apologize.”

Instead Gilman yelps, jumping back as the lava-like potion burns through his robe. “Get away from me. Merlin’s balls, you’re crazy.”

“Uh-huh.” She lets him leave. And as she’s ushering in Aura with Julian and Lucy, she can hear the whispers behind her – “Second year – “ “Didn’t even use a spell – “ She lets them go on like this, as she steps out of the way so Cori, Grainne, and Finn can enter.

The common room empties, and even the Slytherins who recognize what they’re doing don’t approach them. Cori lights incense off the tip of her wand, setting it at an angle. They line up apples and pomegranates. Aura’s good enough at runes now that she can draw some in salt on the hearth. Ivy gives the incantation in Parseltongue.

Then a recitation of their ancestors. And when Aura concludes their lineage with the Peverells and Salazar Slytherin, Ivy takes a breath, ready with Harry’s list of war casualties. “Cedric Diggory, join us. Albus Dumbledore, join us. Sirius Black, join us.”

 

It’s late, and they’ve eaten caramelized apple slices and written out intercessions. The incense fills the common room, and they’re all half-asleep against the furniture. The door creaks open, and they expect it’s another student slipping in late. For all their faults, Slytherins have the good house loyalty to not narc on one another.

Instead, Slughorn’s round face appears in the doorframe. Taking in the sight of them he steps inside, shutting the door behind him. “Detention,” he says wearily. “For all of you.”

“For what?” Lucy says, because she’s the most confrontational of them.

“Indiscretion,” he pronounces. “Just because the Minister – well.” He draws a breath. “These things are not _done_ at Hogwarts.” And then he conjures a pad of detention slips, writing out Ivy’s first. “And I am writing your parents.”

Really, she feels proud of Slughorn in a perverse way. He will never not be terrified of Voldemort, so she’s quite curious how that letter will go.

They pack up quickly, because Slughorn looks tired and things won’t go so simply if he summons McGonagall. “’Night, sir,” Aura chirps as she passes him with the other sixth years.

“Straight to bed,” he tells her.

“We will.”

Cori and the Lovegood twins. Teddy and Ruby, precious Hufflepuffs who actually care about being in trouble. And then Ivy stands alone before the fire, the last of their hyssop still smouldering in the grate. Slughorn gazes at it for a moment, then says in a strained tone, “Stay away from dark magic.”

“Samhain isn’t _dark_. Sir.” She’s still shoving the last of her parchment into her bag.

“Nor is it practiced by – forward-thinking wizards. And there have been other moments – rumors – “

She knows what he means, and denying it won’t help her. “People say all sorts of stupid things. They’ve said the same about all my sisters. It’s just worse because I’m a Slytherin.”

Slughorn heaves a sigh without really acknowledging this. “I taught – Tom Riddle,” he pronounces awkwardly. It’s a name Ivy has only heard a few times before, but she understands that he means Voldemort. “Everyone was so enamoured with him, they didn’t see how – _dark_ the path he was on had become. I regret it.”

She should argue that this has nothing to do with her, that whatever happened in Voldemort’s time at Hogwarts shouldn’t reflect on her now. But – well, they all know that people will react to them as they’d react to Voldemort, and they shouldn’t _have_ to mediate, but sometimes it will just happen. “I have never done dark magic,” Ivy promises simply. “Goodnight, sir.”

“Yes. Goodnight.”

But by the time Ivy goes to breakfast the next morning, the entire school has already heard that all the Gaunt-Potter girls and all their friends have got detention, for performing midnight Samhain rituals. And really, Ivy is going to let those rumors spread too. She wonders how far her reputation can go, before anyone realizes she can’t do magic at all.

\---

The following week is a whirlwind for Harry. Every morning he heads to the Department of Mysteries, where Sirius’s room is filled with research and machinery. “This is awful,” Harry mutters once, spelling false windows onto the walls. “What do you want to look at?”

“The sun,” Sirius says with such hunger that Harry stops.

“Have you been outside yet? – For fuck’s sake,” and then he storms out to find Sirius’s primary healer, a woman named Odette who does not deserve the fury he unleashes upon her. And she says Sirius is fragile, walking is difficult for him, they have not made his return (they do not say _resurrection_ , even though it is) public yet. And finally they’re allowed into an enclosed courtyard at the ground floor of the Ministry. Harry puts an arm at Sirius’s waist for support as he walks, as he’d do on Voldemort’s bad days, and Sirius looks at him with surprise.

“What? Is that okay?”

“Strong,” Sirius mutters. “James was always skinny. I expected you’d be too.”

“Ah, well, it’s mostly Auror training. We did it without magic, more effective that way. Is this alright?” He lowers Sirius onto a bench, then the teapot he’d been levitating before them.

Sirius turns up his face like a sunflower, even though the sunlight is barely breaking through the clouds. “London still smells the same,” he says faintly. “Like… like… sitting in the garden when Mum told me to get out. Just like that.”

Harry makes a sympathetic noise, but this leads to a question. “The Order has still got Grimmauld Place. I deeded it to them, in case we needed it again. It’s in Moody’s name now, he’d give it back if you wanted – “

“Hell no,” Sirius says. “Miserable home. Should be razed.” Then, a faint smile. “Mad Eye. How is he? I didn’t think _he’d_ make it through the war.”

“Nothing will ever kill him,” Harry says with a laugh. “He’s fine.”

“Lost anymore body parts?”

“Ah, maybe a fingertip. He doesn’t work for the Aurors anymore, though. He’s with Minterpol now. Narcotics.”

“He loved the Aurors’ department.”

_Not as much as he hated Voldemort’s Ministry._ “It’s been good for him. Look, I’ve got most of the Order over around Christmas. It’s November fifth now,” he adds, because Sirius has no concept of time yet. “If you’re well enough to come out by then… or even if they could come here. They’d be really, really happy to see you.”

“’Course. Harry, they can’t keep me here anymore,” Sirius says, his voice going brittle. “I’ve spent my entire _fucked_ life in prison, I can’t – “ His hands clench around his mug, tight enough that it would have shattered if not for the unbreakable charm on it.

“You’re right. I’ll ask how much longer – “

“No,” Sirius says severely. “I _can’t_ stay.”

The look in his eyes is wild. “Okay. Ah. I want to buy you a house, but you probably couldn’t be alone to begin with. You couldn’t live with me – I’m sorry. I’d want to, it’s just… complicated.”

“You’ve got a family, then,” Sirius says flatly.

His tone makes Harry’s heart sink. “Yeah,” he says, keeping it light, hoping to elide this news for now. “And Remus would, I’m sure, but it’s complicated for him too.” Because Sirius didn’t know Remus and Severus were married, and it was just going to be unwelcome news too. “Andromeda? Tonks? Oh, Tonks married Ginny, but they’d both be happy to have you, I’m sure.”

“ _You_ were supposed to marry Ginny.”

Sirius seems low-key hostile to the idea of Harry having a family, so he’s really not going to get into it. “They’re really happy. They’ve been together forever. Oh, they’re fostering a kid – or maybe he’s been adopted by now – but he’s at Hogwarts. Another Metamorphmagus.” Sirius seems to stare through him. “Orrr I’ll get you a house if you let the healers in when they need to.”

“Not Snivellus.”

“Not him.”

Sirius sits back. “Good.”

Sirius has been hard to work with in this way – moody, entitled, furious at everything that’s been done to him and everything that’s been kept from him. And Harry is sympathetic but he’s also exhausted. “I’ve got to be at work in a quarter hour,” he says, vanishing his mug. “Let me walk you back.”

“I can take myself back.”

“I’m sure you _can_ ,” Harry says (though he doesn’t, Sirius’s gait is still weak and uneven). “But I don’t want you to.”

“Bring me your cloak,” Sirius says. “I need to get out.”

“That’s a good idea,” Harry says. “But I can’t. I gave it to my youngest daughter, for Hogwarts.”

“What does _she_ need it for?”

“Sirius….” Harry presses his face in his hands. “Don’t do this to me.”

“I’ll fucking kill myself if I’ve got to stay here.”

Harry lets out a strangled laugh. “What would be the point of _that_? I’ll talk to the healers. And to a realtor. I understand why you don’t want to be here, but – “

“Don’t parrot all their excuses.”

“Snape and his team brought you back from the dead, can you be a little fucking grateful?”

“No,” Sirius snaps.

Harry can’t speak for a long moment. Wordlessly, wandlessly, he vanishes the tea setting. Sirius snorts angrily, because he hasn’t been allowed to do magic yet, and his wand hadn’t been recovered with him. So Harry knows it looks like showing off, but he doesn’t care. “I need to take you back to the lab. And then – we’ll try again tomorrow.”

It’s what he’s said to his children before, when they’re all too upset with each other to settle anything productively. But Sirius recognizes it as such. “Stop patronizing me,” he hisses. “Just stop it, you’re not supposed to be my _guardian_.”

“No,” Harry says. “But – we missed all that, didn’t we?” Because Sirius had only been any sort of parent to him in brief moments when they’d last known each other.

Harry conjures a staff – not a cane, Sirius would be horrified by a proper cane – and puts it in his hand. “We have got to go now. I’m sorry.”

So Sirius gets delivered back to the Unspeakables, and he’s got nothing to say to Harry when he goes, which is just so fucking petty. So Harry continues down the corridor, letting himself into Snape’s office. “Give him baobab,” he says as soon as the door is closed. “Or… anything. And a therapist.”

Baobab is a mood stabilizer. He and Voldemort had both taken it in the awful, shitty aftermath of the war. Voldemort still does, even if he has never gone to a mind healer himself, and they would just guess at dosage based on Harry’s connection. It is – useful, even as difficult as the wixie world finds mental health altogether.

Snape arches his eyebrows. “We can’t send him to a therapist against his will.”

“I think you can, though. Quoties can, when they’re becoming a danger.” He doesn’t want to repeat Sirius’s threat to kill himself, even if Snape would find the same dark humor in it. “Just… he’s going to do something rash if he’s trapped her much longer. Again.”

“Ah. Back to his old self.”

“Don’t be a dick,” Harry says. “Just… do something.” He tries not to storm out.

\---

Harry’s got second shift with the Aurors that day, so when he gets home late that night, he’s quite touched to find Voldemort waiting for him. “You didn’t have to,” he says, pressing a kiss to Voldemort’s jaw.

“This morning went badly.”

“Yeah, it did…. Oh, sorry, I wasn’t thinking about Occlumency,” Harry realizes. “Nothing big. He’s just – trapped. And he should be angry about it.” He’s eating asparagus out of the pan like a barbarian; Voldemort brings it and him to the kitchen table. “I told him I couldn’t bring him my cloak because I’d given it to Ivy, and he….” He sighs, scrubbing at his face. “It will take awhile for him to accept that I’m not fifteen anymore.”

Voldemort has nothing to say to this; it is not a relationship into which he has any insight. Instead, he hands Harry an envelope, unopened. “It arrived this afternoon.”

Harry recognizes Ivy’s handwriting, neat and looping. Smiling, he peels off the wax seal.

Ivy writes that she’s not sorry for Samhain – they already knew that all three of their children had gotten detention, as Slughorn had written and Harry had begged Voldemort not to write back. Ivy writes that she got detention cleaning up the owlery, which apart from the disgusting elements, she quite liked. _I am sending this with my new favorite school owl._ Harry grins.

_DADA is going to be harder this year,_ she writes. _Professor Rowan is good but quite strict. And we will be casting spells on each other directly for the first time. I told him I didn’t want to hurt anyone, and he said he doubts any of us are so powerful to really hurt each other. Still, I will be very careful._

By this she mean, all of the tricks in place of spells had their own sort of danger. Harry thinks she is right to be hesitant. But when he glances at Voldemort, he has put down the fork from which he’d been eating potatoes off Harry’s plate. “What?” Harry asks.

“Rowan,” is Voldemort’s terse reply. “You must recognize it. I had heard Callahan had resigned, I never followed up to ask who had been hired in her place. If it is the Horcrux….”

The diadem Horcrux, living abroad for the past thirty years, even as the diadem _artifact_ resided within Hogwarts, a secret manifestation spell burning within it. The Horcrux had taken the pseudonym Tarquinius Rowan to start over, after being trapped by Voldemort for so long.

As Voldemort looks ready to storm Hogwarts at this moment, Harry catches his bony wrist. “Don’t. It’s past curfew. And, ah, it would draw some unnecessary attention if you woke up the castle demanding to see their DADA professor.”

“Why would he return _now_?”

“If he has. And I still think it’s weird that you don’t keep tabs on your Horcruxes.” Though the only other one that hadn’t been destroyed in the war was the locket, which had been dating Draco Malfoy ever since. So, there was that.

“I should visit Hogwarts anyway.”

“Okay. But not tonight.” Harry levitates the pot of potatoes from the stove to serve himself more. “I also need to talk to Andromeda about Sirius,” he says, back to this unpleasant business. “I said I’d get him a house, but I expect it could take awhile. And Remus would, but – Sirius doesn’t know about him and Snape yet.”

“The Wizengamot convenes each Thursday afternoon. I’m sure Andromeda would be available afterward.”

“Really? Cheers. Also he really needs to be in therapy, but I know he’ll be a nightmare about it if I ask – _ugh_ ,” he says, pressing his fists into his eyes, where a headache is beginning to form. “I love him, I love him, I’m so happy to have him back. It’s just – a lot.”

“Yes.”

“Do you want to come look at homes for him this weekend?”

“Of course.”

\---

Voldemort does not storm Hogwarts to see _Professor Rowan_ the next morning. He hasn’t got the time until Saturday, so he takes Minerva McGonagall’s floo and lets himself out.

He is quite fond of Hogwarts, but he sees it so rarely, and never when school is in session. The castle buzzes happily – not just the ambience, but seemingly the stones themselves. Hogwarts loves its inhabitants.

He must pass through the Great Hall to get to the dungeons. It’s just after breakfast, so all the faculty have departed, but a few students linger at each table.

Including Ivy, sitting at the Ravenclaw table between Finn and Grainne Lovegood, as Cori charms her hair. They all look when Ivy does, but she’s the only one who jumps up.

They know to hug carefully on days he carries his walking staff, because he is injured down his left side, and he is off balance on bad days. Still, she slips her small arms around his waist, hugging hard. “Abba,” she murmurs in Parseltongue. Then, pulling back, a smile. “Am I in trouble?”

“Ought you be?”

“No. Not anymore. If you’re here to talk to Slughorn – “

“I’m not.”

“Oh. Good.” She’s leading him back to the Ravenclaw table, but he stops her. “What?” she frowns.

“How are classes?”

An innocent question, but they are alone and speaking in Parseltongue, so Ivy hasn’t got to be euphemistic about it now. “Hard. I just… think I’m not doing well in them so far. Professor Flitwick almost caught my disappearing twine last class, and – and then I don’t know what would happen.”

“Harry says I have failed you as a parent if I endorse lying – “

This gets a warm smile. “I know. Just – in DADA, when they can’t undo the effects because they’re not spells to begin with – “

“That’s quite thoughtful of you.” He had never known children to have much foresight. He and Harry had both been committed to giving their children happy and carefree childhoods, and while Ivy may be happy, she is certainly not carefree. It feels like failure. “Though I quite agree with your professor that you probably cannot grievously injure anyone.”

“I hope not.”

“I am here to meet with Professor Rowan, actually.” When her brow furrows, he must add, “Not about you. Any of you.”

“Oh. Good.” They’re approaching the Ravenclaw table now. “His office is across from the entrance to Hufflepuff. And then are you coming to the Quidditch match?”

Ah, that’s why her hair and nails are tinted blue. “Not this time. Harry and I have an appointment later.”

“Oh.” She looks disappointed. Which is – sweet, really. While children these days are not properly afraid of him as a dark lord, he expects the general intimidation of the Minister showing up to a children’s Quidditch match would spoil the atmosphere.

“Abba, hi,” Cori says happily when he puts a hand on her shoulder. “Ravenclaw is playing Gryffindor.”

“It seems rather unsporting to make Ivy choose Ravenclaw, when they’re playing against Aura.”

“Aura said it was fine, that Ravenclaw needs all the help we can get,” Cori scowls. “Put out your hands.”

He does. Cori charms his nails blue as well. He will leave it.

To the dungeons, across from Hufflepuff’s painting. And when Voldemort reaches for the door, he can already feel it, the same locking wards he has used since he had been a young man. So the Horcrux has returned. Without knocking, he undoes the wards to let himself in.

Rowan – Riddle – Tom is gathering a folder of student papers, a coat and scarf slung over his chair as though he intends to go out to the Quidditch pitch in a moment. When he looks up, it is with a slight roll of his eyes. “Quite dramatic. Close the door.”

Voldemort does, but he steps no farther into the room. “I never heard that you were returning to Britain at all. Certainly not to Hogwarts.”

“It does not involve you.”

“Doesn’t it?”

“No. Sit down,” Tom offers with a sigh, sweeping books off the chair opposite his desk in a great whooshing spell. His voice is different than Voldemort remembers, the upper class accent he had practiced and practiced in his second year now tinged with a sort of sharpness. He has lived among vampires in Albania for thirty years, after all.

“The Humnerë finally tired of you?”

“No. Nor I of them. I will probably return. Or move onward.” He sits back in his chair – and his hair is charmed red, his face a different shape, but he is still the portrait of the life Voldemort couldn’t have, a very long time ago. “I thought you’d come earlier.”

“Nobody informed me of Callahan’s replacement. And I do not control more of Hogwarts than I must.”

Tom raises a shoulder in a shrug. “I am not here for you, or anything of interest to you. Including your children.”

“Leave my children alone.”

“Yes, yes. It is a pity about the squib, though.”

Something stirs deep in Voldemort – fear? Shame? Something he is not familiar with. “How could you tell?” He needs to warn Ivy, to make her that much better – but he will also need Tom to be silenced.

A faint laugh. “Because you taught her to hide things just as we have hidden things. Did you craft that hollow book she carries? It’s quite good. And the Parseltongue lock is better.”

He has no idea what hollowed out book Ivy carries. Probably one of her own design. “She deserves an education here. It is her castle, too.”

A click of Tom’s tongue. “Of course. You know there will come a time when she’s no longer able to conceal it. But until then, I am quite fascinated to watch her try.”

“… Keep her out of trouble.”

“Yes.”

“Excellent. Now – “ Voldemort leans inward. “What do you _need_?”

The smile disappears from Tom’s face. “I want my soul back.”

“You never had a soul.”

“Don’t be tiresome. The diadem is still displayed outside of the Ravenclaw tower, behind enchanted glass. I am content to leave it in its place. I want the Horcrux within.”

In the aftermath of the war, Voldemort had been researching how to reclaim the Horcruces for _himself_ , but that is quite a different question than how to imbue the ghost of a Horcrux with its own soul. “There is no particular advantage to having a soul. You have survived this long.”

“My reasons are my own. And – you haven’t _got_ to help, I have asked nothing of you. I only came to study the diadem.”

“So you haven’t got a plan?”

“No.”

“I will send you my books,” Voldemort says after a moment. The Horcrux is no longer his; their connection had been severed long ago. Harry remains his only Horcrux properly, and that is an arrangement neither of them wish to disrupt, so he’s got little use for the books on the subject anymore.

“Thank you.”

“Do you wish to die?”

A wry smile on Tom’s handsome face. “No. Not anymore than you do.”

“Then it’s a stupid desire. But I will send you my books regardless.”

“Thank you,” he says again. He rises; Voldemort does the same. “Are you joining us for the Quidditch match?”

“No.”

“You have just painted your nails for the occasion?”

Voldemort glances down at his hands, the sparkling blue polish Cori had charmed on him. He quite likes it. “Yes. Good day.” And when he leaves, he re-sets the wards himself.

\---

Ivy is nervous when she enters the DADA classroom for their first day of dueling. She’s come with mini potions pellets that will approximate the three jinxes they’d be allowed to use, and if she squeezes them right, they will disintegrate before her opponent just as she’s shouting the useless incantation. This had been a _project_ , an adaptation of stink pellets that she’d talked with Fred and George about before, and Teddy and Ruby had been subjected to a lot of failures.

But this isn’t a joint class, only Slytherins. And Professor Rowan doesn’t even put her with another girl, but with Fletcher Harcross, who’s got narrowed eyes and a tight grip on his wand as he sizes her up. Because she’s got a _reputation_ now, as someone skilled in dueling if not dark magic properly. She arches her eyebrows at him as Rowan takes his place before the class.

After bowing to each other, they are released to duel. And Ivy knows she’s got to crowd Harcross – she’s got to disarm him to win, so either she’s got to get summoning chalk on his wand or she’s got to take it directly.

When she runs a few paces in, Harcross steps back. “ _Locomotor wibbly_!” he casts. Ivy stops just short, and the jelly legs jinx strikes the ground before her shoes.

“ _Ha_ ,” she says, and then she’s tipping her wand hand forward so a pellet slips into her palm. Throwing her other hand up in misdirection, she brings down her wand while tossing the pellet in the same motion. “ _Impedimenta_!”

The pellet is actually filled with powdered morphellus leaf, which slows people’s reaction times when it’s inhaled. The pellet disintegrates before Harcross’s face, he inhales, and his posture goes a bit slack. Good.

Then Harcross shakes himself off, lifting his wand high. And Ivy takes a pinch of summoning powder from inside her cuff, and when Harcross brings his wand down with another jelly legs jinx, she pivots, pushing his wand to the side. The jinx hits Torin Archuleta behind them; he swears at Harcross as his legs collapse beneath him; and Rowan must come to restore order.

And now there is summoning chalk where Ivy touched Harcross’s wand. Ivy has only got to fake a few more spells before she may plausibly end this. Tipping another pellet from a ring – “ _Flipendo_!” she casts as she throws it.

This pellet, which approximates the knockback jinx, is filled with a minor explosive combination of dandelion and bombastic violet seeds. She throws it low, nearer to his torso than his face, because it’s supposed to disrupt his center of gravity.

The pellet explodes, but Harcross is bigger than either Teddy or Ruby, so it’s not strong enough to move him. Hissing air through her teeth, Ivy pulls a pellet from her final bracelet. Throwing it low: “ _Locomotor wibbly_!”

This had been the most difficult of the three: ingredients that affected motor skills typically had to be either inhaled, like the Impedimenta pellet, or injected. Those don’t work for the localized jelly legs jinx, clearly. She even had written Fred and George for some ideas, and they’d come up with something brilliant. The pellet puts a convulsant instead on the clothing it touches, so as Harcross’s trousers and shoes are dusted with the convulsant, they begin jerking beneath him.

And finally Ivy can duck in, holding up her off hand still powdered with summoning chalk. “Expelliarmus!” The chalk is magnetically attracted, and Harcross’s wand slips from his fingers to snap into Ivy’s palm.

She plunges her fist upward, grinning at Harcross’s glare. “Good, Gaunt,” Rowan says as he strides up. And then she’s looking around, to see all her peers still dueling.

_Dammit_. She hadn’t meant to be the best, just good enough. Subtly she tries to scrub all the chalk from Harcross’s wand before handing it back. And then they’re both allowed to sit out of the way, watching everyone else. Harcross’s shoes still jiggle beneath him, and he grits his teeth as he wobbles to a desk.

Ivy watches Meredith and Saskia circle one another, lobbing Impedimenta and jelly legs back and forth. Then, on the far side of the room, there’s a shout as Miori kicks Torin’s legs from under him, then dives to pin him. She holds his wand aloft.

They’re all loud and laughing and wound up by the end of class, and the four girls fall in step as they go. “I can’t believe you had to duel _boys_ ,” Meredith says, wrinkling her nose.

“It really doesn’t matter,” Miori shrugs. “It’s not all physical strength. …Just some parts.”

“Flipendo didn’t work on Harcross at all,” Meredith says to Ivy. “I saw. He’s built like a hippogriff, there’s no way you could have moved him.”

Maybe she could have, if her bombastic violet seeds had been stronger. She’ll experiment. “Yeah,” she demurs. “But I beat him anyway.” Now she’s got to go stash the remaining pellets, still up her sleeves, in her dorm. Otherwise they might explode on her at an inconvenient time. She’ll have to write Fred and George, to thank them.

\---

When Harry approaches Snape about getting Sirius into a proper home, he gets a conditional yes. “Take Remus,” Snape says. “He conducts himself with some tact.”

Harry grits his teeth at this, as most of his work as an Auror is tactfully delivering bad news and working with people in crisis, but fine.

But he finds this is a cover, because clearly Remus had needed to speak with Harry anyway. When Harry steps through their floo on Monday afternoon, he finds Remus sitting on his sofa, drinking tea as he stares into the middle distance. “Ah, hi.”

“Harry. Come in.” Remus swirls his wand over the tea tray to freshen it; Harry kicks off his shoes before padding across their soft carpet. “How are you?”

“Alright. Saw him this morning. You?”

“Just got back. The healers say they won’t give him sedatives until he threatens them, which,” a bleak smile, “it can be arranged, but I don’t think it should be.”

“God.” Harry scrubs his face. “Okay. I asked if he’d live with Andromeda for awhile. While we’re still buying a house. And he seemed… alright?”

“You haven’t told Andromeda yet?”

Harry shakes his head. “Thought I’d bring you with me. You’re probably better at explaining it.”

Remus clicks his tongue. “Don’t sell yourself short.”

“We met a realtor this weekend. Some homes in smaller towns – all wixie, unless you think mixed use would be better? Or – or maybe it’d be too much at first, adapting to the Statute being lifted.”

“He quite liked the Quotie world as he’d known it. But it is – different now. Faster.”

“Yeah.” Harry is stirring his tea compulsively. “Right, we’ll keep him in wixen villages then. There was one outside Edinburgh, and another in this tucked-away part of Birmingham…. We went to Cardiff, too, to see Q and Phae. He may like it there. The town around the university is sweet.”

“You brought Voldemort?”

“Yeah. Just for company,” Harry assures him. “We’ve got separate bank accounts, it doesn’t affect him financially.”

Remus smiles. “I wasn’t worried, actually. He’s been – exceptionally accommodating of everyone you want in your life.”

They’ll talk around the word _family_. Was Sirius family? Harry wants to say yes, of course, he and Sirius have chosen one another. But for now, he stands quite apart from the assemblage of Weasleys, children, and friends he keeps around his home. “Yeah. …Have you told him yet?” That Remus and Snape were married. Because they both know it is a test balloon for how telling Sirius about Voldemort is going to go.

“I haven’t. Sirius hasn’t had much positive news recently, I was waiting for a better day.” He puts down his teacup, scrubs at his knuckles. “I don’t believe you ever knew this, but Sirius and I were – together. Intermittently. During the first war, and again between his escape and his death. He may expect – he _will_ expect,” he corrects himself in a somewhat brittle way, “that I’ll still be available.”

Harry’s got a fist pressed to his mouth. “Remus. No, god. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because you needed him more than I did, at the time. I didn’t want to take away from your relationship. And afterward… we needed to grieve differently then.”

“God. I’m sorry. I should’ve known.”

Remus shakes his head with a bit of a smile. “Harry, really. It’s fine. I offer it to contextualize – why he’ll take our marriage badly. Apart from Severus himself.”

They can’t burden Sirius with any bad news until they’ve rescued him from that awful, sterile lab. And it’s not like there is much bad news, comparatively – they won the war, and nearly everyone lived – but, well. Harry looks at the grandfather clock. “Think Andromeda will be home yet?”

 

She is, and she receives them with pleasant surprise. Ted is just getting home from a nursery visit, so they step into a sitting room brimming with flowers. “I could never get through winter without them,” Ted says happily, levitating a potted hydrangea to a shelf above their heads.

Harry smiles at it. Sirius could be happy here. Who wouldn’t be? “Please sit down,” he says, and he doesn’t mean to sound like an Auror, it’s just ingrained in him by this point. “We’ve got news. It’s good, but it’s, ah, significant.”

Harry and Remus look to one another when they’re seated on adjacent sofas. Harry’s learned how to be direct as an Auror when delivering bad news – people are _dead_ , not gone or passed or anything euphemistic, because he never wants people to misunderstand him. So, seizing this as inspiration: “Sirius is alive.”

They have to go slowly in explaining it. And Andromeda, beautiful and poised, listens quietly even as she slips her hand into her husband’s. “And we came to ask if he could stay with you for awhile,” Remus says at the conclusion. “A few months, maybe. He just – shouldn’t be alone for awhile.”

“Of course,” Andromeda agrees. “He could have the entire second floor, we are shrinking in our old age,” she says with a smile.

“He might – I don’t know how much care he’ll need,” Harry says. “Healers, that is. He’s alright, physically, but they may need to come here sometimes. And researchers. It has been – a lot for him. Having somewhere that’s actually welcoming will help.”

“When could we see him?”

Harry looks to Remus, who hums. “When Severus thinks you should.”

But Harry’s heart is strengthened by this. The Ministry is closed by now, he won’t be able to see Sirius until tomorrow, but he’s sure the news will help. He and Remus take the floo separately, planning to meet in the Department of Mysteries in the morning.

 

It does not go so easily.

Harry comes already in his Auror’s uniform, because he’s got to get to work immediately after. Remus is already there, drinking tea in Severus’s office. They go.

There’s really not a lot to be done for Sirius’s miserable room – they’ve charmed the walls and the sheets, but medical equipment still lines the room. Sirius is just finishing up a magical aptitude test with a researcher when they let themselves in. “Good news,” he says in a hollow tone. “I’m not a squib, at least.”

Harry can’t internalize this. “Nice. We’ve got good news, too.”

“Yeah?” He folds his legs beneath him, sitting up as Harry and Remus conjure chairs.

“Yeah,” Remus echoes. “This,” he lifts his chin, “is awful. And we’re getting you your own place. But for the time being, you can go live with Andromeda and Ted.”

Sirius’s waxen skin stretches over his skull as he smiles. “Andi,” he says fondly. “I’d like seeing her.”

“As soon as Severus says you may be moved.”

Sirius gives a dramatic sigh. “Bastard. I look forward to never seeing his greasy face again.”

The air feels sucked from the room. Remus leans in. “Well – you’re not obligated to see him again. But we are married, so….”

“You’re joking.”

“No. We’ve been married, ah, nine years. But together since the war proper.”

“Remus, what the _fuck_.”

“I don’t need to defend him, or my marriage,” Remus says calmly. “But I wanted you to know.”

“What the fuck,” Sirius repeats. “ _Why_?”

“Because we worked together for the Order. We got on. We fell in love.”

“You should’ve told me – “

“I’m telling you now.”

“Brilliant,” Sirius says nastily. “Lovely that everyone’s got a happy family already.”

Because Harry had shown Sirius photos of his children a few days before, as well. (Sirius had squinted at the photo. “One of the Patil girls? They seemed nice, not your type.” – “Ah, no, the girls are adopted. I’ve got a husband. I’ll tell you about him later,” Harry had demurred.) He looks to Remus, who lifts a shoulder in a shrug. “May as well ruin everything at once,” Harry mutters.

“What twat did _you_ marry?” Sirius snaps. “Tell me it’s not the Malfoy boy.”

Even though this is going to fall apart in a second, Harry laughs. “No. But that’s a good guess. Sirius, I’m married to Voldemort.”

Sirius makes a strangled noise between laughter and a dry heave. “God, don’t even say things like that – “

“Really. Voldemort’s alive, and we are married.”

Sirius stares. Then, with surprising strength, he grabs a jar off his bedside table and hurls it at Harry’s head.

It goes wide, but Harry is up, grabbing his wand, spelling glowing orbs around Sirius’s hands. It’s what he’s got to do when he apprehends aggressive suspects, and it feels awful to pull it out now.

The jar had smashed against the far wall, and Remus clean it up silently as Sirius glares. Harry takes a breath, having the sense that he’s got maybe three minutes to explain everything. “We’re married, we have been for thirty years. The final armistice was sworn on our marriage. It was a state wedding and everything. He’d taken me from the battlefield, and we worked together in the next few years for peace, and – and we’re soulmates. Oh, and he’s the Minister for Magic now, in his third term. It was his work that lifted the Statute of Secrecy, it’s why we’ve got – well, this world you’ll see, it’s better than what we had. And we have a home, a family. He’s really good to me, to our kids. Remus would have to tell you how everyone else handles it, but – it’s been this way for a long time now.”

Sirius doesn’t even engage with the details. “Your parents would be disgusted.”

Harry hasn’t got it in him to apologize or make excuses. “Doesn’t matter. We’re really happy.”

“It doesn’t _matter_?” His voice cracks.

“No. Not really. It’s a different world now, I’m a different person – “

“You’re a traitor. How the _fuck_ – “

“Because I didn’t want anyone else to die!” And now he’s into it, like he hadn’t wanted to be. “We both wanted the war to be over, this was the best way. I’ve already _had_ these fights, you’re not saying anything new – “

“I apologize for my absence,” Sirius hisses. “I wouldn’t have fucking _died_ if not for him, his war. How much he wanted to kill you!”

Really, it had been Harry’s fault Sirius had died. Harry had run off, had been stupid, had let Voldemort into his head. Sirius should be angrier at him, for reasons quite apart from Voldemort. “I’m so happy,” he says, dropping his voice even as Sirius still seethes. “How many people we saved by ending the war early. I would have saved you, if I could. I’m sorry.”

Sirius moves to press his hands to his face, but the orbs still encase them. Harry releases the spell, even as his hand is still shaky on his wand. Sirius doesn’t throw anything else at him.

“I’m not the one who should tell you everything,” Harry says. “I wish I were. There are books – the newspapers….”

“I’m staying.” Remus, who’d been listening in silence, puts a hand on Harry’s shoulder. “Get to work, Harry.”

“Yeah.”

Sirius says nothing as Harry lets himself out.

 

The Aurors’ department has a clinic with a rather lenient potions policy, so Harry takes a calming draught as soon as he gets in, and another at midday. When he takes the lift to Voldemort’s office at the end of their workday, Voldemort already knows because he always knows. “May I take you to dinner?”

This means anywhere in the world, because the Minister has unfettered global travel permissions. And it’s a nice gesture, but Harry can only ask, “Can we bring it home instead?”

They do. They get sloshed on a Tuesday night, which they haven’t done in years, having had kids in the house the entire time. Then Voldemort ties Harry to the suspensions over the bed, leaving him weightless. They keep just enough Amortentia around to use as lube. And when Harry is lowered to the bed again, he’s satiated and nearly asleep.

“It could’ve gone worse,” he mutters against his pillow as Voldemort conjures a pitcher of water.

“The sex? I agree.”

Harry reaches to slap Voldemort’s narrow chest. “Can you send him… whichever book is the least wrong? And he’s got Remus – sort of – and he’ll have Andi. I just didn’t want to be on the defensive before he understood it all.”

“I’ll leave books with Severus.”

“Thanks.” Rolling over, he presses a kiss to Voldemort’s collarbone, then promptly falls asleep.

\---

Ivy and her classmates have got another week of dueling in DADA. And while Ivy’s first win had felt good at the time, each successive win feels worse and worse. It’s cheating, she’s sure it is. So, when they’ve got double class with the Hufflepuffs the following week and she gets paired off with Teddy, she murmurs before they step into place, “I’ve got to lose.”

“Ivy,” Teddy hisses back. “I’m not that good.”

“Doesn’t matter. I don’t deserve to win.”

So she throws the match. Her technique has always been to crowd her opponent, so she stays back this time, tossing the pellets they’d created, but she never takes his wand. Finally Teddy casts a neat one-two of Flipendo and Expelliarmus, so she stumbles backward as her wand slips from her grip.

And then Rowan is behind them, marking Teddy’s extra credit on a sheet. Then: “Gaunt. You weren’t trying.”

“Yes, I was. Sir.”

“Surely you’re not intimidated by Black.”

She should’ve run in, like she always did before. “I was trying something new. It didn’t work.”

“I see.” He steps away.

And Teddy brings her to a desk along the wall, to watch their peers. “Am I not intimidating?” he asks.

She laughs. “Dunno. Can you give yourself fangs?”

“Mm….” He screws up his face, then a moment later, opens his mouth. “Weird,” he says, tonguing the sharp incisors. And Ivy laughs harder.

 

The term passes. The outside world turns slate and icy. Ivy can no longer go catch frogs in the lake for Cinnabar, so she sets up glass bottles to catch mice around the castle. And sometimes she climbs into the terrarium herself, sitting on a warm stone to read with Cinna beside her. It’s nice.

Cori’s birthday is on December 11th, and Grainne is up early to let Ivy into the Ravenclaw dorms. Ivy wakes Cori up by dabbing frosting onto her face, and after some sputtering and shrieking, they all move to eat cake for breakfast in the common room. And it’s great – Ivy and Cori had been really close growing up, and that had receded with everything Ivy had been forced to hide in the past few years. Maybe, in the future, she’d like to tell her.

And then it’s the final Quidditch game before Christmas holidays, Gryffindor against Slytherin. So Ivy puts on a bright Slytherin scarf and hat, lending two more to Teddy and Ruby, before they walk out to the stands.

It is a bleak, dark grey afternoon. The brooms have lights along the underside to illuminate the players, and both teams are wearing their brightest jerseys, but still they’re squinting into a dark sky as soon as both teams kick off.

Aura has been a Gryffindor Chaser since her fourth year, and her flying is showy and fun to watch, so Ivy laughs even as she scores on Slytherin immediately, because she does a backflip as she flies from the posts. And then Madam Hooch is making wide gestures at her, and even from the stands Ivy knows Aura is apologizing with a grin, as she always does.

It’s a fast-paced game, keeping the crowd on their feet and keeping them warm. Ruby gasps as the Slytherin Seeker only just ducks a bludger hit right at her head; a moment later, the Slytherin beater swoops in to knock the bludger back. The crowds are excited, cheering.

And then the sky darkens, more ominously. It grows cold. And then there’s a shout – both teams turn – and Ivy can barely see Aura plunge her hand into her robes, pulling out her wand to cast a silvery shape. But her other hand slips from her broom – she’s slipping, falling –

Ivy screams, on her feet before she recognizes it. And then all the faculty is up – there’s a curving forcefield cast beneath her, and when she falls, she bounces softly. And then McGonagall and Hagrid and Flitwick are all running to the field. When Ivy looks to the faculty box, she sees that it is Professor Rowan sustaining the shield.

All the players are grounded, and Ivy and Cori are both running onto the field alongside the faculty. Aura’s been lowered to the ground, and her broom flutters impatiently beside her. Ivy grabs it.

She’s pale, slipping from consciousness, and Ivy’s throat is swelling closed with tears. She can’t be hurt – she was fine. Whatever had happened – what _had_ happened?

Hagrid keeps Ivy and Cori back a distance, as McGonagall and Flitwick cast spells on Aura. And then the school nurse is running out, and when Aura finally sits up with a groan, he shoves a lump of chocolate in her mouth. “Eat that, all of it. Dementors, on school grounds! Nasty creatures, awful, wish they’d stay in Azkaban where they belong….”

Dementors. The silver charm, then, had been a Patronus. Ivy wonders what it had felt like, that Aura recognized the Dementors so quickly. The cold, the bleakness of the sky, must have been their descent earlier.

Madam Hooch declares the match a draw; all the crowds shuffle in, deprived of a satisfying finish to the last game of the term. And when Aura is walked to the hospital wing, Ivy and Cori follow.

Maybe Aura only looks small because Hagrid’s got a hand on her shoulder. Maybe it’s something else. “Your Patronus was really good,” Cori says as they enter the hospital wing. “I’ve never seen it before.”

Aura shakes her head, curls bouncing. “I barely got my wand out in time. And we’d practiced enough, but not _with_ a Dementor. If they had been any closer, I wouldn’t have been able to concentrate – “

“How’d you know they were there?” Ivy asks.

“What, before they flew in? I thought it was just getting cold at first, like maybe I’d flown in a cold pocket.” She’s pressed onto a bed by Nurse Hamidi, a thermometer stuck into her mouth unceremoniously. She grimaces. “But then – god, they must’ve been all around – “

“At leas’ five, I saw,” Hagrid says grimly.

And Ivy’s stomach drops. They can _see_ them. She should be able to see them too. But she’d only seen Aura alone, a hundred feet in the air.

Squib. Freak.

 

Their parents are summoned, less because Aura is really injured – Hamidi says she’ll be as good as ever after chocolate and sleep – and more because they have both been involved in Hogwarts’s security magic before. The Dementors fled toward the far mountain range, the other Quidditch players had been high up enough to watch them go. But Headmistress McGonagall is furious, and she’s already speaking about placing Dementor-repelling spells at the perimeter of the grounds, though honestly the Ministry should be handling the Dementor problem themselves….

Harry and Voldemort arrive in impressive time, striding into the hospital wing where everyone is gathered. “Aura, baby,” Harry coos, stroking her hair as though she’s a child again.

She laughs, pushing his hand away. “You’re both so embarrassing. I’m fine.”

“Potter got attacked by a Dementor at a game in his third year,” McGonagall muses. “They were – unfortunately – authorized to be on the grounds at the time. But this time….” She glares at Voldemort.

“Key members of the Wizengamot have been loath to cull the Dementor population. Until such time as they change their minds, may we put some new protective runes around the castle?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” Voldemort looks back to the three girls. “Have you packed already?” he asks. “There’s no reason to take the train to London tomorrow, when you may simply come back with us via floo tonight.”

“Yes – “ “Sort of – “

“Please finish packing. Harry and I need an hour to cast.”

They break. Lucy and Julian are waiting before the hospital wing, to walk Aura back to her dorm. “I’m fine, I’m fine,” she waves them away. “You’re worse than my parents.”

“Are we, though?” Julian says. Aura laughs.

And Ivy peels off from the group, as they head up to the towers and she returns to the dungeons.

As she’s throwing the last of her jumpers into her chest for the holidays, she’s got time to think. It doesn’t help, honestly. She can’t see Dementors. Maybe it’s a product of squibs’ uneven abilities – some can do simple spells, some can at least see magical spaces and creatures, some have got nothing at all.

Maybe she’s getting worse. Maybe Hogwarts will fade around her until she’s functionally Quotidian.

She’s clearly upset, by the time Ruby comes in to help her haul her trunk out the dorms, then she and Teddy levitate it up to McGonagall’s floo. But everyone is just going to assume she’s still scared because of what happened to Aura.

She decides against telling her parents that she can’t see the Dementors. It would only make them worry.

 


	4. Year 2, Part 2

Sirius hasn’t spoken to Harry since November. Not since finding out about Voldemort. And after a few times of showing up and being turned away, he stops coming. Remus takes over Sirius’s care, and last Harry hears, Sirius moves into Andromeda’s home in mid-December.

He does ask Remus to tell Sirius he’s welcome to Christmas. And Remus reports back that Sirius said no in quite an unkind way, but then a few days later, Harry gets a note from Andromeda inviting him to tea.

It’s not until December 23rd that he’s able to go – the entire month is peppered with Ministry celebrations of both Yule and Christmas, and it had only been the night before that they’d taken their family to the great Yule ball. Which is what he finds Sirius glaring at in the papers when he steps through the floo. “Hi. Happy Christmas. You look… better.”

“I still feel like shit.”

“Sorry.” He slides a wrapped gift across the coffee table between them as he sits. “Open it later, in case you hate it. Oh, and I want to give your bike back. I don’t know how to do it inconspicuously. Snape does not approve.”

“Of course he doesn’t, that bag of tits.” Sirius drops his paper on a side table.

But Harry smiles at the photo on the front page, from last night at the ball: he and Voldemort with their hands clasped in traditional dance, while in the background Phaedra twirls Leo Granger-Weasley. The photo nearly captures the shimmering twilight atmosphere of the ballroom.

When Sirius sees him smile, he makes a strangled noise. “You can’t – why is he like this? How the fuck did this happen?”

Harry sees more continuity than Sirius does, clearly. “He’s still important. Still ambitious. Still has a lot of ideas about how the world should go. But he wanted the war to be over, too. I don’t think he was confident he was going to win that one.”

“Good,” Sirius says darkly.

“He left books with Snape. They’re not complete – we’ve never done an interview with any of the authors – but they’re a place to start.”

“Remus told me everything. And Snape, too.”

Harry thinks that Sirius and Snape can barely hold a conversation about the bare essentials of Sirius’s care, so he’s quite curious how they managed to discuss the war. “That’s good of them. Do you want – you can ask anything. Really.”

“How has everyone just – _forgiven_ him?”

“… You know, I’m not sure they have. It wasn’t justice, that he got, well, a minimal prison sentence, and then the armistice conditions. But – we all wanted to move on. We released him, we released the Death Eaters. Everyone knew it was a reprieve.”

“Did they?” Sirius asks, frowning. “Because maybe you haven’t been around enough shitty spiteful purebloods – whatever the fuck you call them now – “

“Oldmage families.”

“ _Oldmage families_ , but their ideologies run deep even if he – _denounced_ his fucking supremacy.”

Voldemort had made no such statements, just moved on to pass transformative and generally progressive policies. “They haven’t been a problem. They can keep their shitty ideas to themselves, there’s no one who’s still carrying out hate crimes.”

“There will be.”

Harry shrugs. It’s hard to fully express this world they live in to Sirius, he needs to see it himself. “We’ve been really happy to live in peace. All of us.”

“Lovely. He still ruined your life.”

“No. But he ruined yours.”

“Yes,” Sirius snarls. “How many _fucking_ times.”

“If you want him to apologize, he will.” At Sirius’s utterly skeptical look: “He will. If it would help. Almost nobody’s taken him up on it, though.”

“Great surprise, that.”

“I don’t know if – moving on is the right choice, but it’s the one most everyone has made. You haven’t got to.”

Sirius stares at the far side of the room for awhile. Then, rising, he strides to the liquor cabinet. “What do you drink now?” he asks, swinging open the glass doors. “Last I saw you it was butterbeer.”

Harry smiles. “Still butterbeer. Whiskey. Rum.”

“Good boy.” Sirius takes down a bottle of whiskey and two lowball glasses. Harry conjures ice. They clink their glasses, then drink.

But Sirius’s hands shake, enough that Harry casts an unspillable charm on his glass for him. “I can’t,” Sirius mutters, setting the glass down too hard. His fingers clench around the drink, and he winces. His fingertips are still dark with frostbite.

“They can’t heal that?”

“Not yet. And it’s just – fucking freezing all the time. Still see that fucking mountain. But they’ve asked everything they want from me.”

Death is a cold, infinite mountain. It sounds like hell. “Sorry.”

“Not your fault.”

But it is, really. Harry lets the silence elapse, unable to say anything worthwhile to this yet.

Sirius drinks deep. Then: “How are your kids?”

Harry’s heart unfurls, cautiously. “Good, really good. You saw Phae in the photo,” he nods. “Q came home from uni talking about getting into magizoology research. And we picked up our youngest three from Hogwarts last week…. Oh,” he says darkly. “Did you see? There were Dementors at Hogwarts, they swarmed Aura during a Quidditch match. She’s fine, but why the hell…. Voldemort is working to banish them, but there’s just not many laws about Dementors to begin with.”

“Not many laws about Azkaban altogether,” Sirius says. “Nobody cares to regulate that miserable place.”

“Hermione wants it closed. But she doesn’t work in the Wizengamot anymore, she hasn’t got that sort of influence. And Voldemort might want it closed, too. But people worry – well, where we’d keep both the prisoners and the Dementors. It’s been a challenge.”

“He used the Dementors before,” Sirius says. “Surely he can just tell them to piss off.”

“… You know, I don’t know what he offered them before. But I’m sure he can’t offer it again now.”

Sirius stares into the fire, pours himself more whiskey, drinks it. “I saw Dumbledore’s portrait.”

“Yeah? Where?”

“The Ministry. Remus and I went. And he’s really – _it’s_ really – happy for you.”

Harry smiles. “Dumbledore was useful. Voldemort worked in the Wizengamot for years, and – well, they found a way to get on. Our girls loved seeing his portrait when Voldemort brought them in. They thought he was funny. Actually, I dunno if any of them have gone to see his Hogwarts portrait. I hope so.”

“He said he’d needed to die.”

“Ah, yeah. Because of the elder wand. Nobody needs an all-powerful wand.”

“He could have done such good with it,” Sirius says in irritation. “And he said – that another Hallow held Voldemort’s soul.”

“Part of it, yeah.”

“What the _fuck_.”

“His soul is back together now,” Harry promises.

“Not – your part.”

Harry exhales. “No. I keep my part. I’m surprised he told you that. His Horcruxes – ah, parts of the Ministry knew, and some of the Order, but never the public. It’s not in those books. We didn’t want – he didn’t want – knowledge of such dark magic being better-known.”

Sirius pours more whiskey, and Harry begins to see it’s all that’s getting him through this. “So you’re stuck.”

“No. We belong together. Our magic works together. It always has.”

“ _Always_.”

Harry can’t help but roll his eyes. “As far back as I remember. Anyway, it was – important. That everyone knew not only that he wouldn’t hurt me, but that he’d do anything to protect me. It was the only reason some of them trusted him, at first.”

“It’s unnatural.”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t sound so pleased,” Sirius snaps. “Dark magic is disgusting. This is disgusting.”

Harry swallows his feelings. “I’m never doing any sort of dark magic. Really, neither is he, anymore. There’s no need. But – I’m really happy with all of this. Even if it all came out of war and dark magic. I wouldn’t give my family up for anything.”

“You gave up your parents pretty easily,” Sirius says nastily.

Harry has spent this past month seething over his same comments from last time; by now his anger has burned out. “My parents are – an idea to me. I was so stuck when I felt like I should be doing everything for them.”

“Good that you got over that,” Sirius bites out.

Sighing, Harry lifts his glasses, presses a hand to his eyes. “I can’t do this. I’m sorry this is a different world than the one you want, but – it’s what we can offer you. I’m really proud of it. And him.” He vanishes his drink. “Tell Andi hi from me, and tell her she and Ted should come by for Christmas. And so should you, if you want.”

“No.”

“Okay. Happy Christmas, then. Can I see you again after the new year?”

Sirius’s gaze looks so empty. “You would have grown up so differently, if you’d had _anyone_ …. That wasn’t your war, you shouldn’t have sacrificed yourself for it.”

“I didn’t sacrifice anything. We are in love. ‘Night, Sirius.”

He goes to the floo slowly, because he doesn’t want this conversation to deteriorate any further, because it had been nearly civil, but it’s over. “Hey,” he says. “If it’s not Christmas – I’m turning fifty next year. We’ve always got big parties in our garden. Think about it.” And Sirius stares through him, and he leaves.

 

Remus texts Harry on Christmas morning, that they’re taking Sirius to Calais for brunch, they send their regards, but remaining in England this Christmas would be too painful for Sirius, but give everyone their best. And then a follow-up text: _We’re setting up his mobile for him, he’s really pleased. And as happy to have that mirror back._

Because Harry’s gift had been a mobile, with instructions about what it could be used for, written as plainly as he could make it. And beneath that, wrapped in safety charms and a soft cloth, was the shattered mirror he had held onto for so long. For every time that Harry had wondered if he should throw it out, if it was too painful and useless, he’s happy to return it to Sirius now. Pulling on a dressing gown, he pads downstairs to help Voldemort put on their Christmas feast.

\---

Harry and Voldemort return to Hogwarts a few more times over those Christmas holidays to put up more security spells. Voldemort goes to a number of DMLE meetings with the Director of Azkaban, and sometimes Harry joins him. Every time they return, they just look grim.

So when the Hogwarts Express is taking the students back, Tonks and Ginny are stationed on it, should anything happen. “We’ll pretend not to know you,” Tonks says to Teddy, even as her hair subtly shifts to match his indigo shade.

He rolls his eyes at her. “Yeah, alright.” And then he and Ivy depart to find Ruby at the rear of the train, while Tonks and Ginny take the front.

There are no Dementors. There is no excitement of any kind. And when this twat Slytherin throws a dark blanket over his head, creeping up on Aura as they walk back from Hogsmeade, he is hit with three jinxes at once, from Aura, Ginny, and Tonks.

 

They are back to dueling in DADA. They’re practicing the feather flurry jinx, so Ivy collects feathers from the owlery in the evenings. She’s got to glue them into loose orbs that will break apart as she throws them, which is a headache until Ruby just performs a sticking spell on them. “A _bad_ sticking spell,” she clarifies, squeezing the ball so it breaks apart again.

“Brilliant. You’re brilliant.”

In class the next morning, Professor Rowan puts her across from Torin Archuleta, who’s loud and indifferent. “Ooh, heir of Slytherin,” he’s saying in an undertone. “Don’t set your basilisk on us.”

“Archuleta,” Rowan snaps. “Take dueling seriously, or go sit outside.”

Archuleta grins at him, undeterred. Rowan steps away.

And then they duel. Everything they’d practiced before is acceptable as well, so Ivy’s got the pellets that approximate Flipendo and Impedimenta from last time. Archuleta casts a tongue-sticking jinx that Ivy only just ducks; she retaliates by throwing the ball of feathers into his face. “Templuma!”

Then Archuleta is spluttering on feathers. Behind her Ivy can hear Harcross laughing at him. It’s a good trick, and she’s pleased it works, but it’s not satisfying to know she did it by cheating. Tipping her off hand forward, she readies a jelly legs pellet to toss at Archuleta’s shoes.

They circle each other, apparent well-matched opponents. Ivy’s jelly legs jinx misses but her Impedimenta hits, and Archuleta’s Aguamenti hits, making her stumble backwards. She’s got to circle around the puddles on the stone floor, and she tosses another ball of feathers as she dodges.

When Archuleta runs in, attempting to cast Impedimenta at close range, Ivy’s already got the pellet for Flipendo between her fingers. Startled, she hits him in the chest with both hands – and the pellet explodes, shoving Archuleta back at least ten feet in the explosion.

“Holy shit, Gaunt,” Harcross mutters behind them.

Because she hadn’t used her wand, hadn’t shouted the incantation. It just looks like wandless magic. Which only really powerful mages are supposed to do.

Archuleta had stumbled back in enough of a spectacle that the entire class is looking at them now. “Sorry – “ She’s running in, concerned that there will be actual burn marks on his chest.

“ _Expelliarmus_!”

Torin disarms her neatly, and she has lost. But that’s not what her classmates are going to remember and repeat later. Dammit.

So Ivy attempts to slink out of class afterward, unsuccessfully. “Gaunt,” Professor Rowan says as she passes his desk.

“Yes, sir?”

“Do it right next time.”

“… I will.” Still, she feels his gaze on her as she leaves. _Dammit._

 

That night, Saskia corners her in their dorm. “How did you do it?” she demands.

“I didn’t mean to.”

She knows it sounds childish – accidental magic is for babies, and certainly a twelve year old should have better control than that. But it’s a better explanation than anything else she could come up with.

Predictably, Saskia sneers. “ _You didn’t mean to_? Like Voldemort’s not teaching you these things. Harry Potter is supposed to do wandless magic too. You probably grew up on it.”

This is half-true – Ivy has watched her parents perform summoning spells by just sticking out a hand, not even lifting their gaze from their newspaper or coffee. The sight always made her ache, how innately magic swirls around her entire family. But a few times, when Q and Phaedra had tried to do their own wandless magic, Voldemort would stop them. Wands are conduits; magic performed without it lacks control. If Ivy had actually done any sort of wandless magic, Archuleta could have gotten really hurt, because it’s harder to determine the force of a spell than with a wand.

But Saskia clutches the dark arts book that Ivy had brought her. “There’s only a paragraph on it,” she says. “Bring me something better.”

At this, Ivy rolls her eyes. “Try the library. I can’t bring you anything else.”

And then Saskia _hurls_ the book at her head.

Yelping, Ivy dodges, and the book thumps against the headboard. “What the _fuck_.”

“You were supposed to stop it. Save yourself with magic.”

Ivy scoops up Voldemort’s book, holding it close so Saskia can’t snatch it back. “Get away from me.”

“Has Daddy taught you Crucio yet?”

“Don’t be disgusting.” She shoves the book beneath her pillow. “Leave me alone.”

Saskia storms off to her own bed, drawing the curtains dramatically. The way the ambient noise of the dorm shifts, Ivy can tell Saskia has just cast a silencing charm. She is so jealous.

But later that night, when Ivy can’t sleep and the book still sits heavy beneath her pillow, she pulls it out. _Enochian Esotera: Jinxes, Hexes, Curses._ She’d taken it from Voldemort’s shelf as an unassuming volume, plain-looking with a navy leather cover. Saskia had left scraps of parchment to mark her place, and Ivy pages through it.

 _Parselmagic,_ reads one heading, where she immediately stops.

She had heard the word before, somewhere. Not from Harry and Voldemort. The page hasn’t got any invocations, just an informational passage: _Parselmagic may be used to great effect against non-Parselmouths, in order to obscure the incantation or effort_. And so on. As there are no instructions for it, and Ivy doubts she can cast anything in Parseltongue either, she flips to the section on potions instead.

 

It is around this time that the Hufflepuffs begin agitating for a new sport. One of the upperclassmen had done her exchange year in Athens, and had come back with stories of a race called the Talophaestion – “They would weave these enchanted woods together into animals, then race them. We weren’t allowed to ride them, but that’s how it was done originally….”

McGonagall is hesitant, Flitwick is thrilled. But since Flitwick already oversees the choir, the faculty dithers over who should supervise it instead. The responsibility eventually falls to Professor Rowan.

On a blustery day in mid-March, a group meets outside the greenhouses. The upperclassmen has brought a copy of the international rules of the Talophaestion and for building the talos itself. “Enchanted wood and other enchanted components are used in construction, but the talos must not have a charm placed over its entire being. Its animation must be a higher order process proceeding from the interaction of its parts….”

Rowan has brought Professor Spiraea with him, who will tell them of the magical woods on campus they are allowed to use. (“Stay away from the Whomping Willow,” he says severely. “I expect any creature made from it would maul you.”) Rowan tells them to reserve spare classrooms to work, and Merlin help them if they stupidly create something too big to fit through the doorway again.

They split into teams. Ivy is already there with Ruby and Teddy; Miori slides in carefully. “Can I join you?”

Ivy sees Ruby and Teddy sizing her up, and she decides that if they can handle being in the presence of one Slytherin, they can handle two. “Yeah, sure. Here, Miori, this is Teddy, and this is Ruby.”

They take a corner of Greenhouse 2, where Ivy gives the smouldering Salamanderplants a little pat before getting to work. Ruby is an artist, so she’s got a sketchpad before her as Teddy thumbs through a copy of the rules. “Something sleek,” she says, sketching a squid streaming through water.

Teddy looks over. “It says at least one appendage has got to touch the ground.”

Making a face, Ruby sketches one tendril dragging along the ground. “What are the fastest animals?”

“Cheetahs,” Miori answers immediately. “Falcons, eagles – oh, but they need to run. Uh, antelopes, I think.”

“Are cheetahs faster than thestrals?” Ruby asks, as she’s sketching a cheetah in motion.

Miori gives her a blank look. “You mean kestrals?”

Ivy doesn’t know if it’s meant to be a secret that Miori is newmage, but she jumps in, in case. “Thestrals. Like a Pegasus, but, ah, bonier. Here.” She takes Ruby’s quill and sketchpad. “They’ve got long legs – and wings – Actually I don’t know if they can use their wings while they gallop, like skimming the ground….” She draws a rough thestral along the bottom of the page.

When she looks up, Ruby and Teddy are wide-eyed. “Have you… seen a thestral?” Ruby asks apprehensively.

Oh. “Not a real one. It’s my parents’ Patronus.” They would send their thestral to herd her back into the house for dinner, or to send messages across a distance. She so closely associates thestrals with the warm glow of a Patronus, she can’t imagine them without it.

They sketch a few more animals, and then Teddy rereads the rules and says their creation hasn’t got to exist at all, and then they’re sketching fake animals: a spherical creature with eye stalks on its sides, a rocket-shaped creature with millipede legs. By the end, they’re laughing hard enough to have awakened some of the mandrakes in their pots. “Shh,” Ivy says, still giggling. “Shh – okay. Let’s go look at the woods.”

There is magical lumber in a shed nearby, left for repairs or just foraged from downed trees. The blackthorn is already picked over, presumably for its dueling properties; so is the aspen. Ruby and Ivy are the only ones who have really heard wandlore before, so Ivy ends up handing woods to Teddy and Miori, in case they can feel a magic that she can’t. “Dogwood is for charms,” she says to Miori, handing her a branch. “Not hazel, it’s temperamental,” she says as Teddy picks up a stick of it.

Miori turns her branch over, wielding it like a wand. “Aguamenti! – _Ooh_ ,” she says as a bit of water dribbles from the tip.

Miori can do more incidental magic with a stick than Ivy can do with her wand and all the desire in the world. It is so unfair. Ivy looks away, her chest hurting.

Ruby is examining a golden-hued pear branch in the light. “We could make a brilliant cheetah out of this.”

“I think everyone will be making a cheetah,” Teddy objects. Holding up some red oak: “Lion?”

“Mmm, maybe.”

Miori has picked up a branch of larch. “Like your wand, right?” she asks Ivy.

“Yeah.”

“What’s it like?”

“Uh….” She plunges into the depths of her wandlore. Larch hasn’t got as many stereotypes associated with it as some woods. She should be able to answer just out of experience. “It’s clever,” she says, what Ollivander had told her as though they both didn’t know she was a squib. “And adventurous. Good for charms.”

Miori swishes the larch through the air; when it does nothing, she shrugs and sets it aside. “Redwood?” she muses, approaching another cord.

“Redwood is lucky,” Ruby says, bending a stick of maple before her.

When it’s nearly time to head in, they look back over Ruby’s sketches. “Cheetah?” Ruby asks. “Or thestral?”

“Thestral,” Teddy says immediately. “I wanna make wings.”

Ruby looks to Miori, who shrugs, and then Ivy.

And Ivy sucks her lower lip into her mouth. “If we make a thestral, it should be with yew. It’s protective, and strong. And it’s associated with death,” she says, a bit apologetically. “Abba – Voldemort’s first wand was yew.”

“We haven’t got to,” Teddy says. “If it would be weird.”

Weird to build an avatar of death, like the dark lord she’s getting the reputation of being. Somehow, it strengthens her resolve. “No. I want to. If you all do.”

They do. So they bundle a cord of yew branches, with pine for accents. Teddy and Ruby levitate it back to the castle, where they’ll begin working in an unused classroom.

So Ivy and Miori walk a bit behind them. “I wish I knew things like you do,” and it’s light but also – not. “It must be nice, growing up with this sort of thing.”

Ivy bristles. Miori doesn’t know how much of a gift she’s been given, that she’s got magic and entry into this world. “I guess.”

“I know it’s better now, that we’ve got school earlier than they used to. But just – _living_ in it – “

She’s jealous. And suddenly Ivy wants to laugh, after the time she spent being jealous of Miori’s magic earlier. Someday, maybe she can reveal why this is funny. “Maybe,” she demurs. “It doesn’t really matter.”

“Of course it does,” Miori says sharply.

Ivy looks up from the stone she’d been kicking. “Okay?”

“It does matter,” Miori repeats. “How are we supposed to learn – this, everything that’s not the sort of thing people write down?”

“… I don’t know. Time, I guess.” Miori makes a dissatisfied noise. They walk up to the castle in silence.

But every weekend after that, the four of them convene for at least a few hours to craft their talos. Ivy orders a book about charming objects to animate with specific conditions, and Professor Flitwick has officially recused himself but unofficially wants to talk to her about it when he sees her reading at dinner. And if it gives her some more ideas about how to fake her way through Charms – well, good.

 

It is a cold day at the end of March, and the upperclassmen are allowed a Hogsmeade visit. “I’ll bring you back a blood lolly,” Cori says to Ivy, when she’s sulking that she can’t come with.

She makes a face. “I’ll feed them to the thestrals.”

“Some cockroach clusters, too.”

“Those go to Cinna.”

“Weird,” Cori says, laughing, and then she is running off from the breakfast table to get ready.

Technically Ivy could get into Hogsmeade. She’s spent enough time studying the Marauder’s Map, she knows of all the secret passages out of the castle. With her invisibility cloak, she could smuggle Teddy and Ruby with her too.

But they had planned to go flying, while the Quidditch pitch is empty. It seems stressful to smuggle herself into Hogsmeade anyway.

She wishes she had gone. She would have even told Cori and Aura about her tricks, if she’d had to.

Instead, they’re tossing a Quaffle back and forth until there is a figure running onto the pitch below, and then there is a Patronus of a cat sprinting upward, until it hovers in the midst of their game. “Ms. Gaunt, we need your presence immediately,” it says in Headmistress McGonagall’s voice.

Her stomach plummets. She throws the Quaffle to Teddy, as though they aren’t going to follow her anyway, before going into a dive. At least she’s good at flying. She gets it from Harry.

Something has gone wrong with her family. Harry and Voldemort are the most obvious targets. But Q and Phaedra are on their own in Cardiff, and anything could have happened to Aura and Cori, even though they’d always been told that Hogsmeade is safe, that they wouldn’t be allowed to visit it if it weren’t.

She lands before Professor McGonagall, who looks more grim than usual. “Come with me,” she says. And she is walking not back toward the castle, but in the direction of the forest. Ruby scoops up Ivy’s broom, shooting her a quizzical look; she shrugs.

When they’re far enough from the castle, Professor McGonagall looks over. “I assume you have experienced side-along apparition before.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good. We are going to Hogsmeade.” Offering her arm, she apparates them both.

They arrive at the far end of the village, beyond the train station. While Ivy expects they will pass the dingy tavern, instead McGonagall leads her straight into it.

Cori sits in the corner booth, drawn and shaken, with Finn and Grainne Lovegood on either side of her. There are three undrunk tankards before them, which McGonagall seems to take badly. “Abe, they are children.”

“Put on some cocoa then, shall I?” the bartender says.

“That would be better, yes. Aurelia hasn’t been in yet?”

“Nope. Send out one of your kittens if you want to track her down.”

Ivy is fascinated, as she’s never heard anyone address the Headmistress like this. Still, she’d edging away from McGonagall’s side toward Cori. “What happened?”

“Dementors,” Grainne says, scooting to make room in the booth for her. “Just when we were coming out of the toy shop up the hill. They swooped in, as though they’d been waiting. And then a Patronus scattered them, but….” She twirls her long blonde hair around her finger in agitation. “It was awful.”

“Cold,” Finn agrees. “And Cori says they _talk_.”

“They don’t talk,” she corrects, clutching the tankard in both hands even if she doesn’t drink from it. “They – I saw memories. Or heard them, really. Fragments. They wanted… I don’t know. Something to do with Abba.”

A targeted attack. Ivy goes a bit sick. “Oh,” she says, sinking back against the booth. “Okay. Is he coming?”

All of their parents have been notified, and McGonagall says they are at least as safe here as at Hogwarts, so they need to just stay put. Then she steps away and they hear from the backroom, “Abe, if you put rum in those, may Circe rip your soul from your body – “

Abe serves four mugs of cocoa with very ill grace. Cori gets some color back in her cheeks as she drinks it. “I thought Aura was an accident,” she says, eating the dollop of whipped cream from the top. “But – guess not.”

“We should learn how to cast a Patronus,” Grainne muses. “All of us.”

Cori makes an unhappy noise. “You haven’t got to protect me. Anyway, I’ve got a portkey, it should work anywhere….”

Each of the girls has got one, a medallion suspended on a chain that they could wear as a necklace. It’s meant to deliver them right to Voldemort’s office in the Ministry if they are in danger. But Ivy never wears hers, and she doubts her sisters do either. Voldemort isn’t going to be pleased to hear it.

Aura arrives with the rest of them – Voldemort is grim, Harry is angry, Luna is mildly concerned. They pull up chairs along the booth, Cori and the twins repeat their story, Harry and Voldemort exchange significant looks. Aura, looking quite at ease drinking Cori’s tankard of ale, says to her, “It’s quite awful, isn’t it? Like being frozen from the inside out.”

“I felt dead inside.”

“Yeah.”

“Why have we even got Dementors,” Ivy demands, suddenly angry that these monsters, that she can’t even _see_ , could target her next. “They’re supposed to be in Azkaban!”

“Yeah, they are,” Harry says. “Obviously we’d like to get rid of them. But – they’re creatures too. We can’t just kill an entire species.”

“How do you kill them?” she asks. Maybe, if she arms herself….

Harry’s smile is a bit wry. “That’s the problem, really. Snape is working on it.”

“Severus is responsible for the logistics,” Voldemort amends. “The legality is more complicated. We can’t exterminate a species because they are inconvenient. The Wizengamot – and likely other departments as well – would denounce it as cruel. Creature rights, if not human rights properly.”

“If only there were an acceptably vegetarian diet for them,” Luna muses. “Like the vampires who drink coconut water.”

Harry scrubs his forehead. “This is going to be an awful question,” he says apologetically to the third years. “Did they want to Kiss you?”

They exchange looks. “No?” Grainne hedges. “The way it looked – they had those hands on your arms, Cor, you’d nearly passed out by then – “

“Like they wanted to take her?”

“Maybe.”

Cori is shaking back her sleeves. There are white blotches along her forearms, as though something still grips her. “Oh god,” she says, scrubbing at the marks.

“Did you notice anyone who seemed to be watching you?” Voldemort asks. “Even anyone you didn’t recognize, really.”

“No,” Cori says. “But… I dunno. We weren’t expecting anyone.”

“You know you need to be more aware of your surroundings,” Voldemort says, his tone deliberate. “Half of all safety is being alert to begin with.”

“Vol,” Harry pleads before Cori can say anything. “Sorry, baby,” he says to her. “It’s fine. We’ll need to take witness statements anyway, and go through the security wards. I’ve already been in touch with Scrimgeour, he’ll be here soon. And so will Malfoy – he’s on duty today.”

This is good – Scrimgeour and Malfoy both come around their home sometimes, so they’re less intimidating than some of the Aurors Harry works with. So Harry is texting Malfoy as Luna says thoughtfully, “You must carry some sort of tool for repelling the Dementors. A silver stake, perhaps.”

“Silver is for werewolves,” Voldemort corrects her in a strained way.

“All impure creatures turn from silver.”

“No,” he says, rather sharply. Most of their friends let Luna’s fancies go unchallenged, but clearly this is important. “Silver won’t be effective against a Dementor. A Patronus will be. In the interim, carry your portkeys. And you probably shouldn’t leave the castle again.”

Aura makes an unhappy noise. “Why should we be punished for someone else being a bastard?”

“Aura!” Harry scolds, barely looking up from his mobile.

“ _Well_.”

The door swings open. Auror Scrimgeour and Auror Malfoy enter together, their red robes brilliant against the dingy space. As Harry stands, he’s conjuring more chairs, but Abe pokes his head out from the backroom where he’d been speaking to Minerva. “Oh,” he says flatly. “Malfoy’s in here often enough, ‘xpect you can serve yourself.”

Malfoy nearly smiles at him. “You make me sound like a lush,” he complains, but casts a spell that pulls two glasses of butterbeer from the tap. “What?” he says at Harry’s look. “It’s bad form to decline a witness’s hospitality.”

“Speaking of witnesses,” Harry says in a brittle tone. “What did you see?”

Everything gets recounted, first from Cori and the twins, then from Malfoy. He was on patrol farther down the hill – “in the bleaker part of Hogsmeade,” he says, lifting his chin to indicate their surroundings. “Not the precious part of the village where you’d been.”

“Precious,” Harry echoes. “You’ve talked to the shopkeepers?”

“Talked to them, and ripped open their security wards,” Scrimgeour says. “There was nothing exceptional within them. It seems that they came in from the direction of the mountains.”

“Like last time,” Aura says. Scrimgeour raises his eyebrows at her. “My teammates saw the Dementors return that way, in December.”

“Escaped Dementors hiding in the mountain range,” Harry mutters. “What a nightmare.”

“They are coming here deliberately,” Scrimgeour says. “There are nearer settlements to the mountains. It’s not as though this is the most convenient for them.”

“At this time, I’d treat this as a deliberate attempt on our daughters’ safety,” Voldemort says. “Though obviously I’d prefer it weren’t.”

Twice is a pattern, if not an airtight one. Ivy would be stupid if she didn’t anticipate she was next.

So there is negotiation: Scrimgeour offers an Auror stationed within Hogwarts, Voldemort says the castle itself is thoroughly warded. His magic does not extend as far as Hogsmeade, so perhaps they can bring in specialists to ward the village and surrounding area.

And then there is the matter of motive. “I’m reluctant to ask,” Scrimgeour addresses Voldemort. “But have you heard from any Death Eaters recently?”

“No. You’d know their movements better than I would, anyway.”

Scrimgeour scrubs his beard. “I’ll ask Hart, if any of them have been released recently.” Because the former Death Eaters had all been bounded by a new Order, which came with vows forbidding use of dark magic or political agitation for a time. “Unless the Dementors are acting on their own behalf.”

“They may be.”

Somehow, this is the more terrifying option, that these creatures would seek out the girls for some unknown motivation, rather than acting on a human’s orders. Ivy sits very quiet and very still, listening to the adults negotiate their safety.

“Have you heard anything?” Harry finally asks Draco. “You’re probably more in touch with the Death Eaters – former Death Eaters – whatever – than Voldemort is.”

Draco makes a noise of distaste. “I was never a Death Eater.”

“I know that,” Harry says, exasperated. “But you’re in with all those oldmage families, in ways I’ve never been.”

Draco drums his nails along the table. “What, who’s most likely to bear you ill will?”

“Yeah, actually.”

Draco and Voldemort exchange looks, considering. “Nobody was particularly – disenfranchised by the second war,” Voldemort says. “The reparations of the first war – the seizures, the sackings – that resentment had been useful to me. It was necessary that we not repeat it.”

“Greengrass?” Draco suggests. “She’s lost three children, she should be furious, but Daphne says she’s nearly blind and entirely housebound these days. Avery lost his son, but he died a few years back. If Macnair had anyone to avenge him, you’d think they’d do it after he’d been Kissed. Same with any of the Lestrange family. The Crabbes had family in Belgium but they didn’t seem close. And again,” he spreads his hands, “the war was so long ago. Why dredge it up now?”

Harry offers Draco a smile for his recitation. “That’s why I keep you around.”

“What, all the dodgy purebloods who skulked around my manor in my childhood? Cheers.”

“Greengrass, Macnair, Lestrange, Crabbe,” Scrimgeour reads off his notes. “What is the name of Nott’s son?”

“Oh,” Draco says, a bit flatly. “Theo. If you would really like to accuse our generation, that was nothing but _fucked_ by the Death Eaters….”

“I’m not accusing anyone,” Scrimgeour says. It’s clear they’ve all forgotten the children are here at all – otherwise Draco might have apologized for his language. Instead, they are back in old conflicts, old wars.

“Theo lost his father. Pansy Parkinson’s grandfather lost his estate. Daphne Greengrass is her mother’s caretaker now, with all three of her siblings dead. Blaise Zabini’s mother and Greg Goyle’s parents both fled the country. Beatrice Yaxley came to stay with me while her father was imprisoned. So did Gotlinde Rowle.” He tilts his head upward, thinking. “There are probably more,” he mutters. “But really, they fucking hate the Death Eaters. And everything you did to them,” he addresses Voldemort directly. “They would never want to revive it.”

“This seems like motive enough,” Scrimgeour says, looking down his list. “Until we hear evidence of new political agitation, we may assume it’s not a factor.”

“I really….” Harry is looking over Scrimgeour’s notes too. “I’d never suspect most of these people, honestly. Aura practically grew up with Blaise’s daughter. And some days I see Pansy more than I see Voldemort, since Ruby is over so often.”

Scrimgeour slashes a vertical line down the page to begin a new column. “Their children,” he says. When Harry recoils, he makes an impatient noise. “I don’t believe they are responsible. But if they are a conduit of some sort…. Minerva?” he calls to the backroom. A moment, and she strides out from her conversation with Aberforth. “We need a roster of all the students currently enrolled.”

“No.”

“… I beg your pardon?”

“I object to the implication that our students may at all be involved in this matter.” When Scrimgeour begins to protest, she says severely, “You recall what happened last time we treated our Slytherin students as – criminals.”

Ivy knows a bit – when the house had been suspended and all the Slytherins had fled into hiding for the better part of Harry’s eighth year. “I wouldn’t suggest they have any responsibility,” he says, and conjures a chair so she may watch him write.

And the list is – _illuminating_. Ivy is surrounded by the children and grandchildren of Death Eaters – Torin Archuleta’s great uncle had died as a Death Eater in the first war; Ruby’s grandparents had been financial supporters; Dashiell Flint’s grandparents had fought in both wars and gone to Azkaban for a time. In Cori’s year were family of Yaxley and Selwyn, though neither of them were Slytherins. And it is all complicated because honestly, every oldmage family is related in some way.

“Good,” Scrimgeour murmurs, looking down his list. “Really, the ones with children then agreed to plea deals before the ones without. Presumably they’re also less likely to cause trouble now.”

“Having children is no indication of morality,” Voldemort objects.

Scrimgeour shushes him, as though he’s heard it before. “No. But it made them more cautious then. They had investments in the future. As we are prioritizing the investigation – “ He checks off the names of former Death Eaters without school-aged children now. “As you say, Minerva, we will keep your students out of it.”

“I should hope so.”

So they divide up responsibilities, which Death Eaters each of the Aurors should question. Draco gets quite a long list of people he suspects will talk to him and no one else. Voldemort will meet with the Director of Azkaban again, to determine whether they may construct wards that will keep the Dementors in. Minerva says Hagrid must ask the centaurs if they’ve seen any Dementors in the fields along the far side of the forest.

At last, they break. Voldemort is leaving a few galleons on the table – a gross overpayment for the few sickles of drinks, Ivy thinks, until she sees that Aberforth had closed up the pub for them. And Harry turns to Minerva: “We’ll return them before curfew.”

“My floo will remain open.”

“Thank you.” He’s got a hand on Cori’s shoulder, as though his touch itself can rejuvenate her. Maybe it can; Harry is more powerful than he ever acts. “We’re meeting Q and Phaedra for dinner.”

At this, McGonagall’s face softens to a rare smile. “I hope the university has been good for them.”

“They are so happy. We’ll tell them you say hi. ‘Night, Minerva.”

They apparate from Hogsmeade directly, to the edge of the campus of Gwydion University. Harry is texting with the twins already, only briefly looking up to point them in the right direction.

Cori looks better, but she’s still tugging at her sleeves where the Dementors had grabbed her. “Did it hurt?” Ivy asks.

“Mm, maybe. I think so. It just felt… empty, really.”

“That sounds scary.”

“Yeah.” Deliberately she pushes her hands into her pockets so she will stop fidgeting with her sleeves.

They meet up with Q and Phae just as it’s getting dark, and really it’s good for their family to be together again, after three months apart. “Cor, you are so brave,” Phae says, scooping her into a hug. Then: “So, so, _so_ brave,” she coos, swinging Cori back and forth until, laughing, she breaks out of Phaedra’s grip.

They walk to a nearby diner, crossing from the wixen neighborhood to the Quotidian one. “We always come out this way,” Q says as they’re examining the street. “They’ve got more to do on their side. And they find us _exciting_ ,” she pronounces.

“Yeah, well, I hope you’re not getting drinks out of them for a cheap Leviosa or something,” Harry says.

Aura laughs. “I hope you _are_.”

Over dinner, everything is recounted. Phaedra listens with a frown creasing her brow; Q picks at the label on her beer bottle. Harry goes so far as to say that the Aurors will be questioning the former Death Eaters, as the people with the most likely motive. He is clearly apprehensive about the possibility.

There’s a pause, then Q says cheerfully, “Well Ivy, you’re next.”

“Q!” Harry admonishes.

“Luna said we should carry silver stakes,” Ivy says.

Q blinks. “To do what, exactly?”

“Stab it?”

“No. Not at all. _Luna,_ ” Q sighs, which tends to be the general consensus about her. “I’ve got a class about the physiology of beasts now, it’s brilliant. They can be repelled by bright light, mirrors, asphodel. Really, you should both just learn the Patronus, it’s a fantastic spell. Phae picked it up, what, fourth year?”

She shrugs. “I thought it was pretty. I’ve never needed it. Hey, send your next Dementor our way?”

“Happily,” Cori says, and Phaedra laughs, dropping a squashblossom fritter onto her plate.

“Should we ask Scorpius?” Q suggests, looking to Harry and Voldemort. “About the Death Eaters.”

“Not unless he knows something Draco doesn’t. Also,” Harry raises his eyebrows, “I didn’t know you still see Scorpius.”

“He’s in town now, we go to the wixie night at Pyramid together,” Q shrugs. “I don’t know what – or who – he knows.”

“Also, he’s fragile,” Phaedra objects. “Be careful with him.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

But Voldemort, who’d listened quietly with an arm around Harry’s shoulders, looks interested now. “I’ll visit them.”

“Why?”

“Because I have business with Corvus.” Draco’s partner, Scorpius’s not-quite-stepfather.

“Oh,” Q says, giving Voldemort a curious look. “Sure. They’ve just adopted another cat, he’ll probably make you hold it.”

Harry chokes on his drink at this.

The conversation wanders far from the Dementors, Death Eaters, all of it. Phaedra tells them about her theory of charms class (“She said charms evolved out of tracing runes on objects, then in mid-air, and now we’ve forgotten that it was once a written practice.” And Ivy, being her, stores this away as potentially useful.) And Q tells them about her law of beasts and beings course (“and it’s not that centaurs and mermaids don’t need the wixen advocacy, it’s just that they’re overrepresented compared to the advocacy being done for goblins and trolls”). And at last, Harry glances at his pocketwatch. “We need to get you three back to Hogwarts before Minerva locks you out for the night.”

“Good,” Aura says. “I want to sleep out on the Quidditch pitch at least once.”

Harry considers. “I’m not saying I wouldn’t have done it, or that it’s not brilliant. But wait until it gets a bit warmer, yeah?” Aura grins at him, flipping her curls off her face.

There’s a public floo nearby; they walk over together. “Can you go on your own?” Harry asks, putting a knut in the floo powder dispenser. “Or should we come with?”

“No, we’ve got it,” Aura promises.

“Walk Cori back to Ravenclaw, then?”

Cori scowls. “I’m not a baby.”

“You are _my_ baby,” Harry says with teasing sincerity. Then, pulling her into a hug, “I’m sorry about today. It will be better after you sleep. Write to us in a few days to say you’re alright.”

“’Kay.” Hug for Voldemort, then she reaches for the floo powder.

“Ivy, wait a moment,” Voldemort says, his hand closing around her shoulder as she moves to follow them.

Aura clicks her tongue. “Abba finally heard about all your dark magic.”

“Yeah, right.” She waves them on. “See you tomorrow.”

“Bye.” And both of her sisters step into the floo.

“All your dark magic,” Voldemort repeats, pulling her toward a bench. Somehow he doesn’t seem surprised.

She finds it funny by now. “It’s just a thing that people say. They think I’m very good at magic,” she says wryly.

“You _are_ very good at magic,” Voldemort says. Harry is on her other side, a hand on her back. “However – I assume you didn’t know most of what you heard about the Death Eaters today. And we want to know how their children treat you.”

Archuleta, Flint, Rowle. “Pansy is always nice to me when I’m with Ruby,” she says doubtfully. “I don’t think she – hates you or anything.”

“No,” Harry agrees. “She’s been good about it, keeping her feelings apart from you. What about the others?”

“Saskia Rowle is the one who wants to duel me. And she asks for dark magic books,” Ivy says, neglecting to mention that twice she’d given her them out of Voldemort’s library. “She’s fine. She can be stupid. Don’t do anything,” she pleads at Harry’s look. “I’ve got to share a dorm with her for another five years.”

Harry laughs. “Okay, yes. Be careful with her.”

Saskia doesn’t scare her, she’s just annoying. “And Flint and Archuleta are – boys. When I win in dueling, they say it’s only because of dark magic.” And not because she’s cheating by any measure.

“Teenage boys are the worst, I’m sorry,” Harry says, still amused. “Just – if they say anything – if you feel like anything is wrong – tell us, alright?”

“Yeah.”

“And you need a Patronus,” Voldemort says thoughtfully.

She’d been worrying that too. “I know. I don’t know how.”

His mouth curves in nearly a smile. “That is a question for researchers and specialists paid to develop such things. Not for an exceptionally bright twelve year old.”

“Though we appreciate the ambition,” Harry adds.

“Until then, be careful. Don’t be outside alone.”

“I know.”

Hesitation, then Voldemort says, “I do wish things were simpler for you.”

“It’s alright.”

“Write us.”

“I will.” She squeezes them both, then takes the floo powder from its bowl. “Bye. See you in June,” she says cheekily. Then she steps into the floo, and she’s gone.

 

When they arrive home, Voldemort goes immediately to his study. Really, the Dementors would be more of a political headache if it weren’t his own daughters being targeted, making it obvious that he is committed to solving this as soon as possible. And even if any Death Eaters are involved, nobody would assume he was so cruel as to orchestrate it.

He writes in a journal, shared with his secretary Penelope Clearwater, that he needs a meeting with the Director of Azkaban as soon as possible. And, apart from Snape, he needs more researchers on Dementors themselves. Specifically, he needs a mechanism that would stand in for a Patronus. He may even tell people it is a public good.

The Dementors had been tentative allies during the first war, when he had promised them the souls of the traitors to his regime. They had lost faith in him – if these alien creatures may have such human feelings as _faith_ – after his death. Otherwise the subsequent imprisonment of all his Death Eaters in the Dementors’ watch would have gone much worse for the Ministry.

Now, he has nothing to offer them but their own demise. And it is delicate – the Dementors have a power like Legilimency, to dredge up the memories of the humans before them, and Voldemort thinks it would go quite poorly if they discovered memories of his plan for their extermination.

He thinks they would quite willingly take their anger out on his children for that.

He would never forgive himself.

So he bypasses the letter to the Department of Magical Beasts. He will be appealing to the Unspeakables once again.

\---

Ivy feels weird around her Slytherin classmates though, now that she knows so much more about their families. Her father made people _suffer_ , not just his opponents but also his followers. Even though they had chosen to join the Death Eaters, and their consequences were their own – she sees why so many of them might be bitter, even now.

The next morning, Teddy and Ruby run to her at the Slytherin table. “What happened?” “Is Cori okay?” “We waited up for you, but then McGonagall sent us to bed.”

Smiling, Ivy scoots to make room for them on the bench. (And with a look of contempt, a Slytherin girl on the other side moves much farther down. Good.)

So she recounts it – Cori is fine but she’s probably having a lie-in now, and they all sat in on an important meeting with Voldemort and the Aurors and Professor McGonagall, and nobody knows why the Dementors are targeting them but Rufus Scrimgeour is mobilizing the Aurors’ department to find out. “Until then – well, I’m not supposed to go out alone. And Cori was talking about learning the Patronus charm.”

“You should too,” Ruby says, before her brain catches up with her mouth. “I mean – sorry.”

Ivy only smiles. Her friends can forget she’s a squib. It is a relief. “Not yet,” she says, in case anyone else at the table is listening. “I’m not scared. We’ll find something.” And yet they look at her with such sad, sincere expressions that she’s got to push away her scone. “Really. Abba wouldn’t let anything happen to us.”

“Good,” Ruby says, though she doesn’t seem convinced.

“Ruby.” She can’t stop thinking about it, even if this will be a terrible question. “Does your family hate Voldemort? For the wars?”

But Ruby’s look means that her parents might have kept the worst parts of the war from her, just as Ivy’s had. “Maybe. They don’t really talk about it.”

“Your mum is always really nice to me. And maybe she shouldn’t be.”

Ruby makes an incredulous noise. “ _You_ didn’t do anything.”

“No, but… I dunno.” They’ve never fully talked out their fight from last year, when Ruby had shouted at her that Voldemort had ruined everything. She might believe it, now. “There are others. Death Eaters,” she clarifies.

“Nana and Grandfather were never Death Eaters,” Ruby says quickly. She’d probably heard it at home herself. “They gave him money, but they gave a lot of people money.”

“Oh. Ah, good?” She looks around at the table – it’s still early and they’re fairly alone – before leaning in to tell them about Archuleta, Flint, Yaxley, Selwyn, Rowle.

Teddy is horrified to hear there are so many Death Eaters’ relatives here – not because they’re scary on their own merits, but because their families may bear Ivy ill will. Conversely, Ruby is quite blasé. “If Saskia wanted to curse you, she’d probably have done it before now.”

“Maybe she’s waiting to learn some of the really bad curses.”

Ruby makes a face. “And maybe you should stop bringing her dark arts books.”

Ivy laughs in spite of herself. “Yeah, I know. I won’t.”

“Good.” She’s pulling apart a poppyseed muffin on her plate. “Nana really hates him, I think,” she says cautiously. “But Mum will never let her say it when she thinks I’m listening. So.” A shrug. “I think it was sort of the same for all of them. We didn’t hear a lot about the war.”

Because Ruby has moved in oldmage circles since her birth; that the same families who had known each other for generations remained close. Harry and Voldemort had been outsiders to that world, Death Eaters or no, so Ruby attended all the sorts of fancy oldmage parties that Ivy never would. It’s less pronounced now, since everyone else would meet in primary school now, but still – Ruby just knows more than she does on these matters. “Do you miss them?”

Ruby laughs. “One of my first memories is Saskia and Giacinta Yaxley throwing all my dolls into the pool. I see them just often enough.”

“Oh my god.”

“Yeah. Just – I’m sure they haven’t got anything to do with it, they’re not _evil_. But next time I’m at Saskia’s birthday, I’ll listen to their parents. In case.”

Ruby is so good to her, when she should be resentful really. Ivy gives her a smile. “Like spying?”

“It sounds so exciting that way, doesn’t it?”

\---

But the Dementors will not attack Hogwarts for months. And Harry hears murmurs of suspicion among the Aurors, that as soon as they begin monitoring the Death Eaters, things go quiet. And he doesn’t want this to be correct, but. Well.

Somehow, Draco is taking this in stride. “I saw Marcus today,” he says, dropping a report on Harry’s desk. “His son had never mentioned it was your daughters who’d been involved. He is not a good enough liar to pretend he’s not involved if he were.”

Harry flips through Draco’s report. “And his dad is working for the Department of Finance now. I don’t think he’d fuck it up.”

“Yes.”

Harry casts Geminio, for his own copy of the report, before handing it back. “Selwyn next?”

“Despite the reports that he keeps fire crabs for guard dogs at his front gates, yes.”

Harry blinks. “Those aren’t even native to Britain, how the hell…. Ah, I mean, good luck.”

Draco snorts, but rather than leave, he spells Harry’s office door shut. Harry raises his eyebrows. “What did Voldemort want with Tom?” Draco asks. “He wouldn’t say.”

The utter fucking weirdness of Draco being married to the locket. It will never not make Harry’s head hurt. “I don’t know. But I didn’t ask. Why?”

“Only in case it may cause unexpected upheaval in our carefully-curated lives. That’s all.”

Harry makes sure Draco sees him roll his eyes at the melodrama. “I’m quite sure he’s not. You’re just not that important to him.”

“Cheers.”

“Uh-huh. …Oh, did you know the diadem is back in Britain?”

Draco’s eyebrows arch. “No. Why?”

“To teach Defense?” Hearing it, he laughs. “Really, what the hell. Voldemort didn’t tell me what it was about, but the Horcruxes aren’t my problem. Other than the obvious,” he adds, when Draco’s expression twitches.

“Well done. I’ll have to speak to him.”

“Will you?”

Draco gives him a mildly incredulous look. “It’s lovely that you feel your children are safe with him, but for whatever has gone wrong at Hogwarts to coincide with his arrival… he’s not above suspicion.”

“Oh. Mm.” Harry sticks the end of a quill in his mouth absently; Draco zaps it out with a grimace. “I trust Voldemort. Whatever they said to one another. But sure, go.”

“And I’m taking Tom. Don’t tell Scrimgeour.”

“Yeah, no.”

So Draco lets himself out. And Harry takes his lunch in Voldemort’s office, so he may ask _just_ how much faith he is putting in his Horcruxes.

\---

The inaugural Talophaestion will be held in June, with the seventh year teams competing. Ivy’s thestral will remain in its classroom over the summer, as they figure out the best mechanism to make its wings flutter, lifting it into a sort of skimming gallop. But on a mild day just a week before the end of term, they are heading out to the Quidditch pitch, where racetracks have been temporarily painted.

In her trick pocket, Ivy carries asphodel, a mirror, and the Marauder’s Map. The former two repel Dementors, if only momentarily, but it’s all she’s got. The latter – she’s written to the figures in the map to ask whether it will recognize Dementors, and gotten back minimally useful responses. She’s sure if she wrote Remus he would write back, but he likely wouldn’t know the answer either. But she’s curious, whether Dementors would show up with whatever mechanism the map tracks people, because she hasn’t crafted a Patronus yet and she’d at least like a forewarning.

The books she’s found about Dementors don’t even mention wixes not being able to see them. It makes her feel very alone in this world. But she can get around it.

At least they’re corporeal. Maybe she can throw some paint on them or something.

The Dementors hadn’t come to any outdoor gatherings since March – not Hogsmeade, not Quidditch. Ivy settles into the stands between Teddy and Miori, looking over the seventh years’ creations. A bear, an otter, a sphinx, an ostrich. They all twist and shudder at the starting line, their joints articulating and wooden frames clanking.

Rowan steps to the starting line. After saying something to the teams, he raises his wand. “Anima!”

It’s the only spell that may be cast on the talos; otherwise they must move under their own power. So the students gasp and laugh as the figures shake off, blink at their creators, and then trot and gambol down the racetrack. The teams run alongside the creations to cheer them on; all the students in the stands are laughing and shouting.

The track is the length of the Quidditch pitch, so they watch as the bear lumbers along and the sphinx swerves, its joints cracking under its weight. The otter moves like a real one, playful and curious.

“No!”

A sixth year Gryffindor, seated near Aura, is on her feet. She’d brought binoculars to the race, but she’s looking out toward the mountains now. Everyone looks to where she’s gesturing.

And Ivy’s pulling out her map, already charmed visible. But before she can open it, there’s a firm hand clasping her shoulder. “Come,” Slughorn says tersely, and he’s pulling her away from the stands, casting a shield in a bubble behind them.

“Wait – Cori – “ She is attempting to turn back, with little success.

“Filius will bring her. Here.” He’s charming a doorway that leads beneath the stands, bringing her down a staircase. It’s a sort of storage area, filled with Quidditch equipment, and Slughorn doesn’t even stop to address her again before he’s running back out. But she hears him charm the door closed behind himself.

The shed has windows, enough to see the crowds running from the stands as the faculty rushes onto the pitch. Professor Rowan has cast a shield that stretches across half the sky, while Professor McGonagall’s cat Patronus splits into three and charges forward. And Ivy is shaking out the Marauder’s Map.

At the very edge of the Quidditch pitch, beyond McGonagall and Spiraea and Nyx’s names on the map, there are – something. Scratching, undulating blobs, bobbing closer where Rowan’s shield must hold. It looks like the essence of discord, as the ink scratches and erases itself from the page.

She looks back up to the scene – then, frowning, down again. It takes a moment to spot the discrepancy, but – Professor Rowan’s name doesn’t appear on the map. He stands between McGonagall and Nyx, yet there’s only a blank spot on the map there.

Her throat goes funny.

And then the door swings open again, and Ivy barely shoves the map into her pocket. Cori is running in, and Aura is behind her, Hagrid’s hand on her shoulder. “My Patronus is great,” she’s complaining. “I’m old enough to fight.”

“There’s no’ gonna be a fight,” Hagrid says firmly. “Professor McGonagall is gonna banish these things, an’ you’re gonna get Auror escorts back home for the summer next week. And then – your dad,” (he clearly doesn’t want to say Voldemort, he never does) “will sort out this problem before next term.”

Aura is still watching out the window hungrily. “We’re not helpless.”

“Never said yeh were.”

She’s resigned to stay, mostly because Hagrid’s got locking spells only faculty could use. Sitting on the bench beside Ivy: “Abba’s going to be furious. He said if it happens again, someone in Azkaban is getting sacked.”

“Are they Azkaban’s problem?” Cori asks skeptically. “Or are there… wild Dementors?”

They look to Hagrid. “Never any wild ones I’ve heard of.” He’s still watching out the windows himself, as Flitwick is also casting a Patronus beside McGonagall. “They’d always been – cultivated by wizards. Leas’ in Britain. We wouldn’t have Azkaban without ‘em.”

“If they ruin my last year of Quidditch next term…” Aura says darkly. And Hagrid smiles at this, in spite of himself.

At last one of McGonagall’s cats delivers the all-clear to release them from their improvised bunker. And Ivy is surprised to find the rest of the student body clustered still at the edge of the field. She had expected them to flee. But maybe they are coming to see these disruptions as normal.

Rowan and McGonagall draw together; after a brief conference, McGonagall amplifies her voice. “We may as well get on with it,” she says, gesturing to the talos wandering now along the Quidditch pitch.

They file back to the bleachers, and the seventh year teams come to re-set their animals. This time, though, Cori and Aura sit a bit closer to Ivy, and they are all still watching the sky.

 

The ostrich wins, and two of the seventh years on its team, who’d been circling each other all year, kiss deeply in celebration. “Wilcox!” McGonagall snaps at the Gryffindor, loud enough that she can be heard from the stands. “Show some decorum. You as well, Popper.”

The girls don’t look a bit abashed as they lead their ostrich away. The other teams collect their animals. Everyone goes in, in good spirits.

And Ivy’s got a new mystery to solve. Professor Rowan had always been… fair to her. He’s not the demonstrative sort, but he clearly cares for magic, and since she’s a good student, they get on alright. But she’s got no idea what sort of magic would mask him from the map. From what she’d gathered about the enchantment from writing to Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs (she knows who these people _are_ , or rather who they would become, but Harry says the map is only a caricature of them), the figures on the map are tracked by soul magic. And while soul magic isn’t de facto dark, any spell that could override it is likely powerful, and almost certainly being used for some nefarious purpose.

Maybe the Dementors are making her paranoid. If Professor Rowan meant any harm, he had had all year to enact it.

In any case, most of all she would like to not draw undue attention to herself in his class. Nor would she like to be on his bad side if she is discovered.

She needs to find out more about Professor Tarquinius Rowan.

\---

Their girls make it home safely from Hogwarts for the summer. Voldemort is irritated that they weren’t notified of the June Dementors; Minerva tells him that the faculty are quite adept at crisis management; and anyway they are giving particular care to the Gaunt-Potter children. So, as usual, Harry is effusive and charming to make up for his arsehole husband.

And then it is summer, and they are planning his fiftieth birthday party. It’s a milestone in wixie culture but not an overly impressive one – for a lifespan of around two hundred years, fifty is about the age when some wixies are looking at a second career, a second marriage. “Huh,” Harry says when Voldemort mentions this over coffee one morning before the girls are awake. “I’m not sure I’m bored of this one yet. You?”

“Not yet.”

Harry grins over the rim of his mug. “Cool. Hey, I’m seeing Sirius today.”

“To invite him?”

“That’s the plan, yeah.”

“I hope he’s – amenable.”

 _Not a massive douche_ , is what he should have said. Sirius is still explosive, angry, capricious, at a lot of things but most of all when Harry speaks, however obliquely, about his family.

Sirius fears he has been left behind, and Harry would like to deny it, but…. But.

Sirius still lives with Andi and Ted, until the healers declare him well enough to live alone. So Harry takes the floo mid-morning, bracing himself.

Andi had given him the second floor to himself, and Harry is allowed up as he pleases. “Sirius?” he calls, climbing the stairs. There’s a clatter of dishes, the bang of a wardrobe, and Sirius opens his bedroom door as he’s still pulling on a shirt over his skinny, sallow chest. “Sorry,” Harry says. “Bad time?”

“No worse than any. Here.” Sirius brings him to a tearoom, small but overlooking the garden. “Harry, look.” And he withdraws a new wand from his jeans pocket. “ _Incendio_.” The lantern before them is lit.

Harry sighs in actual relief. It had been the greatest milestone of normalcy in his mind, when Sirius would get a wand again. “Nice. How does it feel?”

“Like I’m no longer some inept squib, unfit to handle my own magic.”

He doesn’t mean it, of course he doesn’t. Harry sinks into the plush armchair opposite. “Congratulations. Did you see much else of Diagon Alley?”

“Yes,” he says. “Too much. It’s all bright, fake. At least Ollivander’s is just as he was. Hasn’t got to cater to any Muggle customers.”

This isn’t wrong, it’s just uncharitable. “It was worse – or, well, something – in the first few years after the Unification. The Quotidians would buy any sort of rubbish, and as long as the shops weren’t defrauding them, it’s not like we could do much to stop them. The demand for Quotie-safe magical products has leveled by now.”

“There’s an entire floor in Flourish and Blott’s, all these books explaining us as though we’re animals.”

“I’m sure they don’t mean it badly…. And really, those sort of books would’ve been helpful to me too, in the beginning. We try to make up for the kids who aren’t growing up in magical homes, now that we’ve got early education, but – it’s probably helpful to them as well.”

“It’s patronizing.”

This is approximately how visiting Sirius goes, prickly and difficult. Harry shrugs, not sure how to defuse this. “I actually came to ask – I’m planning my birthday party. Everyone is coming. I hoped you would too.”

Harry sees the muscle in Sirius’s cheek clench. “How can they just – be around him. Willingly.”

Eight months into getting Sirius back, and this is as far as they’ve gotten. “You really haven’t got to have anything to do with Voldemort,” Harry says, invoking his name because _he_ and _him_ get tiresome. “He understands. He spent the first decade of our Christmas parties not even looking in Hagrid’s direction, because that was the only way Hagrid would come.” When Sirius just sort of looks through him, he sighs. “Is there something you want from him? Other than for us to not be married.”

“Then no, nothing.”

“Great. Then just… he’ll stay on one half of the party, you stay on the other. It’ll be fine.”

“… Maybe.”

Harry offers a smile he doesn’t actually feel. “Cool. Good. Take the floo with Andi?”

“With Remus and Snape, more like.”

Sirius spends more time with them than Harry had expected – not because Snape is actually as unforgivable as Voldemort, but because Sirius just seemed to hate him more viscerally. So he’s not privy to whatever’s changed between them, but – good. “Cool,” he says again. “Want to come out to lunch? There’s this Thai place that’s just opened nearby, Pansy said it’s good.”

Sirius’s gaze is still a bit glinty, but he heaves himself out of his chair. “Sure.” And then he allows Harry to catch him by the elbow, holding him steady before they apparate.

 

And then it’s Harry’s birthday party, and he and Voldemort are up early that summer morning, cubing melon and tossing cold noodle salads. Their girls wandered downstairs one at a time, with Ivy and Teddy last since he’d slept over the night prior. “Happy birthday,” Ivy mumbles into Harry’s back, hugging him from behind as he’s still marinading eggplant planks.

“Thanks, baby. You want breakfast? Toast?”

“No. We’re taking Cinna to the pond this morning. She’s never caught her own frogs.”

This elicits a laugh from him. “Tell her to be careful, then. And be back by noon, yeah? I don’t want to explain to Ginny and Tonks that I just let Teddy wander all across the countryside.”

“Too late, they already know,” Teddy says, flashing his mobile. And then they both scamper out.

Hours later, his friends begin arriving via floo, apparition, portkeys. Harry hears Ron’s car pulling onto the gravel along their front garden; grinning, he rinses his hands before going to greet everyone.

No Remus. No Snape. No Sirius. Not yet.

He presses cold bottles of beer into his friends’ hands. Two for Hagrid, who’s already talking to Q, because she’s got a cryptozoology course next term that he’s fascinated by. Dean’s family follows in Neville’s; Fred and George come bearing an enchanted harp that they say makes everyone an exceptionally talented dancer when it plays. “Does it?” Voldemort asks, skeptical, as he reaches for his wand.

And Fred throws himself before the harp as though taking a bullet for it. “Don’t spoil it yet,” he pleads. “Also, we’ve got something for Ivy.”

Voldemort tucks away his wand, his face softening incrementally. “Thank you. She’s still out.”

“She really shouldn’t be, I said noon,” Harry says, approaching the back door. He conjures his thestral Patronus, used now more to corral their children back home than anything dangerous.

And then there’s the whoosh of the floo, and a lot of noise at once.

Remus and Snape, on either side of Sirius. Hermione had run up to him, and so had Tonks – because of course they’d all seen Sirius before now, but leaving the house was still a lot for him. He’s carrying a bottle of rum with a bow stuck to the front, and he clutches it close as the room all turns toward him. “Where’s Harry?”

“Here, I’m here. Hi.” Coming in, Harry takes the rum in one hand, hugging Sirius around the neck with the other. “Thanks for coming,” he murmurs into Sirius’s long hair.

“Yeah, well.”

Hug for Remus. None for Snape. “Get you a drink?” he offers, moving in the direction of the kitchen.

And they follow, but then he hears footsteps falter. “What the hell is that?” Sirius mutters.

Harry looks back. His thestral Patronus is approaching the back door, with Ivy and Teddy trailing after it. “Mine,” he says, because he can’t yet tell Sirius they technically share a Patronus. “It changed after the war. I really like thestrals.”

Sirius gazes at it for a moment too long. “Thought I’d see Prongs again,” he says, voice thick.

That’s fair, honestly. “There’s still photos,” Harry says. “It’s sort of iconic. Just – “ He pulls open the door, letting the kids in. “Hey,” he says to Ivy and Teddy. “Wash your hands first. Catch any frogs?”

“No,” Ivy says, pushing her snake’s head back inside her collar discreetly. “But Nuzzle had babies. They are….” She makes a gesture the size of a galleon.

Nuzzle is the snapping turtle who lives in their pond. “Great,” Harry says. “We’ll go see them later. Hey, you haven’t met Sirius yet,” he offers to Ivy. “ – No, no handshakes, what did I just tell you? Can you, I dunno, bump elbows or something?”

Sirius is guarded around his children, and Harry sees the struggle between his attempt to be civil toward kids versus his hostility toward everything to do with Voldemort. “I’m Ivy,” she says, pushing her braids off her shoulders to peer up into his waxen face. “I’ve got your map.”

“… Good,” Sirius says. “Hope it’s still being put to good use. We spent at least three nights a week out after curfew to make it.”

“It’s really helpful,” she agrees. “Thank you.” And then she and Teddy run off to wash up.

Sirius watches after her, even as Harry’s handing him a lowball with ice for his rum. “How old?”

“She turned thirteen in May. Our youngest,” Harry reminds him.

Sirius gives him a look. “Harry, I know. Give me some fucking credit.”

He offers a conciliatory smile. “Right, yeah.”

And when Sirius ends up between Ted and Hagrid, Harry is able to step away to see everyone else. Luna has brought Pansy, and all three of their kids are running off to find Ivy and Teddy. “Happy birthday,” Finn chirps, pushing a spiral seashell into Harry’s grasp as he passes.

“Thanks, Finn. …Hey, they’re probably in Cori’s room, she was still putting on makeup last I saw her.”

“Okay.” He takes the staircase two at a time.

Their house fills, his friends taking sofas and chairs and soft patches of grass. The kids all end up in a version of freeze tag – accomplished with potions, not spells, thank goodness, so Harry hasn’t got to worry about Ivy. He wanders across their sunny back garden, between breezy tents, with a whiskey soda in one hand and one of Hermione’s buzzberry tarts in the other.

“What the _fuck_ did you do to Regulus?”

It’s not even that Sirius is loud, it’s just that Harry is attuned to a particular cadence of confrontation. His stomach dropping, he’s turning to run back into the house.

Sirius has just cornered Voldemort in a nook of their dining room, his hand gripping the front of Voldemort’s robes as though they’re about to brawl. “Sirius – please don’t, fuck – “ Harry is babbling as he runs up.

Without looking, Sirius casts a shield between them. Harry bounces off it, swearing.

And Voldemort can’t draw his own wand. They’d always known this, that it would always only escalate things. So he is exceptionally careful as he reaches up, casting a wandless spell that uncurls Sirius’s fingers. And then he holds Sirius’s hand up by the wrist. “They’ve never fixed the frostbite,” he remarks, studying the blackened tips of Sirius’s fingers as though he has not nearly been choked out.

“Don’t touch me.” Sirius wrenches his hand away. “Monster.”

And Harry has pulled apart the shield, but he doesn’t know whose side to take, so he just hovers there. “Sirius… please don’t cause problems. You probably should know what happened to Regulus, but you haven’t got to be a twat.”

“Your fucking priorities,” Sirius marvels.

“Yeah.” By now Harry has slid in beside Voldemort. The magnetism of their magic just happens like that. “Here, ah – take the library. Have you got to do anything?” he asks Voldemort, who had presumably been busy in the kitchen before Sirius had accosted him.

“I intended to light the firepit soon.”

“Molly and Arthur will get to it. Here.” He’s not thinking about it, the way he slips his hand down Voldemort’s wrist, intertwining their fingers. It’s as near to an apology as he can offer, yet.

Sirius hasn’t even been in their home before, so he’s studying the library as they enter. “Oh,” Harry says. “A lot of these books came from Grimmauld Place – “

“I don’t want them. They should probably be burned.”

“… Okay.” He’d offer to pay Sirius for them, but really Sirius already has a coin purse that comes out of Harry’s vault directly, and instructions to buy anything with it. He pulls Voldemort onto the sofa and charms the doors shut.

Voldemort looks to Harry. “What have you said about the Horcruces?”

They’re going to do this, then. The truth. “Not enough,” Harry says, before sitting back against the sofa.

So Voldemort recounts everything dispassionately: that Walburga had brought Regulus to him on his seventeenth birthday, that she’d introduced him as her only child, that she was angry and fearful at the Black family slipping from pureblood prominence. And Regulus might have loved dark magic academically, but he hadn’t wanted to fight, that he’d wanted to do things by politics and flattery instead. And then his dark arts books had led to the discovery of Horcruxes, and then to _Voldemort’s_ Horcruxes, and then he had taken the locket from its cave even if he hadn’t discovered how to destroy it. And then Voldemort would kill him, dropping his body into the lake of the inferi. Regulus’s name had become anathema among the Death Eaters, even if they’d never learned why; and while Orion had already died, Walburga never spoke to Voldemort again before his death or hers.

Silence. Then: “Monster,” Sirius spits again.

Voldemort shrugs. Being liked still means nothing to him. “Would you like me to apologize?”

It’s a question he’d posed often, in the aftermath of the war. And Harry is irritated by it, because of course everyone says no, yet it gives Voldemort the plausible deniability of saying he tried.

But Sirius leans in. “Yes.”

An arch of Voldemort’s non-brows. “I’m quite sorry that Regulus was caught up in the Death Eaters, while he was so ambivalent. And so young.”

“Rather your thing, preying on children,” Sirius says nastily.

Voldemort ignores the innuendo. “Mine, Dumbledore’s. That war devastated one generation. I did not want to destroy another.”

“Good of you.”

He makes an indifferent gesture. The surrender had been self-serving as much as anything, and somehow, Voldemort would rather people believe him self-serving than selfless. It is easier. “Is that all?”

“I want the locket.”

Voldemort pauses. “No.”

“If I can’t bury him myself….”

“The locket is gone. It was severed by vampires, who objected to my immortality.”

(Only technically true. Harry will have to warn Draco to never let Sirius find the locket in his home now.)

“So you’ve only got Harry left.”

“Yes.”

“You don’t deserve him.”

“No,” Voldemort agrees quite readily, making Sirius’s expression snarl with surprise and anger. “But deserving him was never part of the agreement.”

So now Sirius sees what they’d offered the rest of the world, that it had been more important to preserve Harry than to condemn Voldemort. “This is fucking horrifying,” he mutters into his glass. Then he’s reaching for the arm’s chair, heaving himself standing, and Harry is jumping up too until he’s steadied on his feet. “Get off me. I’m not so fucking infirm.”

“Okay.” He barely moves his hand. “Can you grill?”

“’Course.”

“Cool. Remus and Arthur typically do most of it, they’d appreciate another set of hands.”

They’re both aware of how much it sucks that Harry is in the position of being the adult. It shouldn’t be like this. But Sirius is rendered mute by fury, and Harry doesn’t dare disturb it, so they descend the staircase in silence.

And when Sirius has been left between Remus and Tonks, Harry returns inside. Voldemort is alone in the kitchen; Harry catches him around the middle and presses his face to Voldemort’s collarbone. “Sorry, I’m really sorry,” he’s muttering in Parseltongue.

“Harry. Really, it was fine.” Voldemort is extracting one hand to charm the stovetop cold. “What had you expected?”

“That he’d never acknowledge you at all.”

“Ah. Gryffindors,” Voldemort says, so Harry laughs and releases him.

Then the rest of the party goes as all their parties go: there’s drinks and music and food as they wander under great breezy tents along the back garden. He puts an unspillable charm on his vodka lemonade and lets Ginny lead him in a Quotie swing dance. Justin made custard from his hens, Ron brought a berry tart, and Pansy and Luna had constructed an ice cream cake made of at least as much magic as ice cream. “It’s beautiful,” Harry tells Luna as she charms a knife cold to slice into it.

She hums. “It was a distraction. But thank you.” And in lieu of putting a candle in Harry’s piece, she just casts a cold fire to envelop it. Laughing, Harry takes the plate.

Late in the afternoon, people retire inside, worn out by the sun. They put on a footie match in the living room and set out pitchers of iced water.

Until Voldemort, near the windows, glances out and makes a strangled noise. Harry follows his gaze.

Sirius is just kicking off with his motorbike. And behind him, Harry recognizes Ivy’s fluttering blue robes as she clasps his waist.

They’re both striding toward the back door, but only Voldemort has drawn his wand. And Harry grabs his wrist in disbelief. “Don’t.”

He’s only pulling open the door now; the motion barely stops him. “I won’t hurt them. Obviously.”

“No. But – leave it.” At Voldemort’s glance, Harry lets go deliberately. “I trust him with her.”

Voldemort doesn’t, and the way their magic coil apprehensively hurts them both. They are going to fight about this later, but not now. So Voldemort casts a vast shield charm beneath the motorbike, and steps aside.

They stay out for at least an hour, until the sun begins to dip and everyone returns to the firepit to roast skewers for dinner. Sirius lands the bike beyond the flowerbed, and Ivy is slipping off the back to run up to Harry and Voldemort nearly before the bike has stopped. “Did you see us?” she asks, her cheeks flushed with sun and excitement.

“Yeah. Did you like it?” Harry asks her, levitating her flying helmet and gloves back to their Quidditch stash.

“It’s better than a broom. Flying is… good. It always feels like magic.”

This would be obscure if anyone else overheard her. But Harry smiles. “Good. But hey, we’d really prefer you ask first, next time.”

“Sirius said it was fine.”

For god’s sake. “Ask next time,” Harry reiterates, because they can’t get into it now. “And after you wash up, go find Cori and the others and ask if they’re hungry.”

“Yeah.” She runs off.

And Sirius trudges up the garden path, obviously sore from the ride. “Finally,” he mutters, looking back toward his bike. “You kept it in good condition.”

“I added new charms,” Harry agrees. “I’d pick up _Mage Mechanic_ every once in a while. It’s still a great bike.”

“Yeah.”

“Want to take it home?”

“Yeah.”

“Cool.” They’re walking in the direction of the firepit. “Ivy was thrilled. She loves flying.”

“She said as much. Not Quidditch, though?”

“Not yet. She’s only going into third year, maybe when she gets older. And she’s got this new sport – competition, whatever – racing crafted animals – “

“The Talophaestion,” Sirius says. “It’s an old sport. My father placed in it every year. I assume Dumbledore took it out of the school, too pureblooded for him.”

“Huh. I hadn’t known. She’s happy, anyway,” Harry shrugs. They’re skewering bits of vegetables and halloumi, taking an empty spot around the fire. Harry levitates two cold beers out of a cooler.

And Sirius stares into the fire for a long time. “I saw Reg there, just once,” he says at last. “Not that – I ever thought he’d survived, but it was a certain sort of closure. The only ones I saw were dead. Not Kissed, not ghosts, just….” He swings the beer bottle wide to gesture. “He said it’d be more trouble than it’s worth to get his body. And wizards… most think it’s odd, how fixated Muggles are on the corpses. Not like they mean anything. But knowing he died for a reason, not just being a scared stupid kid….”

Harry’s heart hurts. “We never really gutted Grimmauld Place,” he offers. “His room is still there. If it would help.”

“You should’ve gotten rid of it. A child’s bedroom, taking up space.”

“I mean. It just felt so – particular. And we didn’t need the room anyway.” He takes a charred cherry tomato from the end of his skewer, pops it in his mouth. “You haven’t got to. But – I took things from Godric’s Hollow. Art, dishes. The girls have most of their jewelry and robes now. It’s nice, to just – keep things around.”

“You’ve been back,” Sirius says flatly.

“Uh-huh. I go every Samhain. Only started when I was older. Oh, and only Aurors can get inside the wards, so. It’s still pretty preserved.”

“Harry – god – “

“I know it’s weird. It’s all weird. You’ve been good,” Harry says, though that’s not entirely true. “I was just – never going to be able to choose between them. So I haven’t.”

Sirius scrubs a hand through his stubble. “You’re nothing like I thought you’d be.” When he sees Harry’s expression shift, he adds a bit gruffly, “Not in a bad way.”

“Cool.”

And that’s as much as they manage, that night. When the sky grows dark enough, Fred and George pull out great fireworks like dragons, gnashing and weaving above them. And Harry slips onto a bench beside Voldemort, who’s clearly worn down from an entire day of socializing. “Alright?”

“Yes. Happy birthday.” And he fits Harry against his side, and their magic keeps them warm as they watch the fireworks overhead.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Talophaestion is here because Hogwarts needs more spectator sports than just Quidditch.
> 
> Sorry this chapter is so Sirius-centric; clearly he's what I've really wanted to write for awhile.


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